The Tribune

BY DENISE MAYCOCK Tribune Freeport Reporter dmaycock@tibunemedia.net FREEPORT - VOLUNTEERS combed the beach in East Grand Bahama collecting trash and debris during a coastal walk and clean-up exercise. The Ministry of Tourism and local groups, including Keep Grand Bahama Clean, EARTHCARE, the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, the Royal Bahamas Police Force, Royal Bank of Canada, FINCO, and students from St George's and Jack Hayward High Schools, Bishop Michael Eldon High School, Tabernacle Christian Academy, and Mary Star of the Sea School took part this year. The Coastal Walk & Clean-up is held by the Ministry of Tourism's Coastal Awareness Committee and the Sustainable Eco-Tourism Committee. Barbary Beach, which included Old Freetown beach, was the venue for this year's clean-up. Volunteers walked the six-mile beach picking up trash and logging their finds. Gail Woon, founder of Earthcare, said her team of volunteers removed 163 pounds of marine debris from the beach. The Earthcare team collected beverage bottles, plastic bags, shoes, bleach cleaner bottles, oil/lube bottles, rope, pipe, styrofoam, buckets, deodorants, Neosporin, and sun block, medicine bottles. Also collected were brooms, propane tanks, kneepads, insecticides, balloons and ribbons, cyalume sticks, fishing line, crates, tarps, buoys, food wrappers/containers, hair products and drinks cans. The coastal walk exercise was also two-fold as volunteers also took part in a bird sighting exercise. Marcia Taylor, a student of St George's High School, found a Wilson Plover nest. She won a Caribbean Endemic Bird Festival t-shirt for her find. "We saw the female Wilson's Plover doing the broken wing routine trying to lure us away from the nest. So I looked closer...and when the bird moved I noticed the egg in the nest," Taylor said. Team Leader Erika Gates had advised volunteers to be extremely careful and vigilant because the nests are difficult to spot and the eggs could be crushed if stepped on. EARTHCARE told the group of the five endemic birds to the Bahamas. They are the Bahama Parrot, the Bahama Woodstar Hummingbird, the Bahama Oriole, the Bahama Swallow, and the newest endemic, the Bahama Warbler. Dr Lisa Sorenson, President of the Society for the Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds, said that 31 per cent of approximately 565 bird species of the Caribbean islands are found nowhere else in the world.