Eagles force quiet work at Fourth Street Preserve

While volunteers from Dogfish Head picked up shovels and planted trees in the Fourth Street Preserve, a bald eagle flew by, carrying a fish back to its nest.

The nest in the preserve is impacting the type of work that can be done to restore the 30-acre parcel.

Federal regulations require a 330-foot no-disturbance zone around the nest at all times. But during nesting season, December through June, that doubles to 660 feet. 

“The eagles are preventing us from doing anything that creates a lot of noise – chainsaw activity, building bridges with drills and saws and generators,” said Rodney Robinson, a landscape architect who is managing the master plan for the preserve. “We have to get a general permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife to tell us what we can and cannot do. Until then, we’re doing quiet work.”

Robinson said the most concern is for the eaglets that will soon be in the nest. He said if the nest were to fail, the city could be fined.

He said the eagles are also delaying a required groundwater study, because equipment has to be brought to drill a 10-foot-deep hole.

Robinson said they will still be able to start building a pair of footbridges that are outside the no-disturbance zone, closer to Canary Drive.

Engineers from George, Miles & Buhr are designing the bridges to support the city’s 14,000-pound maintenance equipment. Volunteers from Boy Scout Troop 1 are expected to actually build the bridges.

One of the quiet jobs began to take shape April 13. Taryn Davidson, Urban and Community Forestry Program coordinator with the Delaware Forest Service, gave the volunteer Dogfish employees a lesson on how to dig the right-size hole and place the trees just right in the preserve’s first habitat island.

The trees are all native species – eastern redbuds, tulip poplars and sycamores.

The master plan shows 13 habitat islands dotting the preserve.

“This is considered a super clump, so we’re basically planting more of what we would do in a natural forestation event. We’re going to plant in other areas using different methods to see how that takes off,” Davidson said.

They will be planting one in the spring, one in the fall and spreading it out over five to six years, according to Scott Wilkinson, a master naturalist.

“It’s survival of the fittest. We know we’re going to lose up to 40%, but it’s allowing for the strongest trees to emerge from that,” Wilkinson said.

Robinson said the biggest threat comes from the very large deer population. The first job the volunteers had was to put up a fence to try to keep the deer at bay.

“If the deer get in here and destroy them, we haven’t lost that many trees. We didn’t want to plant the whole thing and then see what happens,” Robinson said. 

The trees were provided by the Forest Service and the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays.

The City of Lewes now owns the preserve, after a fundraising campaign raised $8 million to buy the property from the Rollins family. The preserve is not yet open to the public.

A restoration campaign is now raising money to pay for the restoration, which is estimated to be about $825,000.

The fund will host its third annual Race for Open Space Saturday, April 25. The 5K run and one-mile walk will start and end at George H.P. Smith Park.

A Friends of the Fourth Street Preserve group is being organized to provide stewardship for the land. For more information, go to fourthstreetpreserve.org.