I am squeezing three topics into this week’s blog. Two have been on my mind for a couple of weeks and are updates — on the Little Free Library and on The Island Free Press website. The third is an update on turtle nesting and buffer changes that deserve a few more words.
LITTLE FREE LIBRARY IN WAVES
The Little Free Library in Waves that we wrote about last summer added a new section — for kids — in the spring.
Little Free Library is a movement that is sweeping not only the county but also the world since the first one was established in 2009 in Hudson, Wis. It’s based on a very simple concept of “take a book, leave a book.”
Pam Strausbaugh of Waves established Hatteras Island’s first Little Free Library next to the multi-use path behind her house in the spring of 2014. She says she first learned of the Little Free Library from a magazine article and loved the idea. She commissioned her own little library, which was custom built by Rodanthe craftsman Steve Thompson, last December.
“I’m a huge book person — huge,” she says. She has an iPad, but she says “There’s nothing like a book, the feel of the pages, the smell of it.”
Strausbaugh’s library is a little wooden house with an A-frame roof standing at about eye-level on two white support posts. It’s painted yellow and has a window in the front. Through the window of the little house, you can see a pile of books. And next to it is a bench painted yellow and green.
She said she has had a tremendous response to her Little Free Library. Her husband put a counter on the door of the little building, and it was opened 278 times during one week this summer.
She said she hasn’t had to use any of her own books for the adult library since the blog appeared last summer. She purchases Little Free Library literature and bookmarks to put in the library.
Last spring, she decided that children needed their own library, so she added an even smaller little house, painted green with a little green-and-yellow Adirondack chair next to it. There’s a container of wrapped candies inside the little library.
“I didn’t have enough room in the other library to have both adult and kids books, so I decided why not?” Strausbaugh says.
She says she wishes that she had a better vantage point to view the Little Free Library from her house, but her garage is in the way. Many people on the other side of Highway 12, she says, love to tell her about all the people stopping by and taking photos.
“I do have to tell you of one day last week,” she wrote in a recent e-mail. “I was coming home after a very long, hot day of work and there were two young boys — I would say around 8 or so. The library door was open. They were both sitting on the bench, each engrossed in a book! Wow, you don’t see that very often in this day and age with computers and video games. It made my day.”
Strausbaugh said that she isn’t getting many donations of children’s books, so could use more of those.
If you can spare any that are in good condition — paperback or hardback but no magazines, please — you can drop them off at the Little Free Library, 25508 Highway 12 in Waves. Or you can e-mail Strausbaugh at islandgreen458@gmail.com.
More information about Little Free Libraries and how to start one is available on the website, www.littlefreelibrary.org.
TURTLE NESTS AND NIGHT DRIVING
Last week, I wrote about changes in wildlife buffers around turtle nests that have allowed more public access to seashore beaches this summer.
This has been a good thing, and the National Park Service staff members have worked really hard to get the new buffers in place for this nesting season.
However, with the opening of some beaches to night driving on Sept. 16, it has become obvious that the increased public access isn’t going to immediately happen at night on beaches with turtle nests about to hatch.
In fact, this year, beach drivers will encounter more beaches than usual closed at night because of turtle nests.
This has made some anglers very unhappy, since fishing at night is both productive and popular — and thus very important to seashore users and local businesses.
This issue has arisen because of the new buffer regulations, and it isn’t happening because the NPS staff doesn’t want more beaches open at night. It is a function of the record turtle nesting at the seashore this summer.
There are turtle nests all over the beaches and they are hatching left and right, some much earlier than usual because of the warm weather.
Though driving is now allowed during the day in front of nests that are expanded to the ocean, the routes are closed at night because headlights from ORVs could confuse hatchlings.
Seashore officials are using the same half-mile buffer on each side of the nest that they have for the past several years. If the nest about to hatch is less than a half-mile from a ramp, the ramp is completely closed from 9 p.m. until 7 a.m.
As of today, five of the seashore’s 17 ramps from Bodie Island to South Point at Ocracoke are closed at night. Unfortunately, Ramp 44 to the very popular Cape Point, which has only recently reopened to ORVs, is one of them.
Groups that advocate for more reasonable public access — including the Outer Banks Preservation Alliance, the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association, and the Cape Hatteras Anglers Club — argued during public comment on the new buffers last spring that the Park Service needs to deal with the large night buffers with some kind of more effective light barriers.
The groups made some suggestions for barriers that did not make their way into the final rule, though seashore Superintendent Dave Hallac has made it clear that discussions can continue to try and find ways to open more beaches at night.
It seems likely now that the discussions will continue over the winter.
Meanwhile, we can enjoy more daytime driving and hope that the remaining nests hatch in a big hurry. The seashore’s natural resources staff is making a concerted effort to get more complete and specific information to the public about night driving closures.
You can check the Beach Access and Park Issues Page on this website for updates.
Hallac talked about sea turtle nests and the new buffers — and many other seashore topics — in an interview that I did with him on Wednesday that will be broadcast at 5 p.m. Sunday on my Radio Hatteras show, “To the Point.”
You can tune into Radio Hatteras at 101.5 FM to listen or listen to live streaming on the website, www.radiohatteras.org.
The audio of the interview will also be posted next week on the Island Free Press website.
AN ISLAND FREE PRESS MILESTONE
This month, The Island Free Press is celebrating eight years of bringing community journalism to Hatteras and Ocracoke islands.
On Sept. 5, 2007, we published our first edition.
This is what I wrote in my first column, “Shooting the Breeze,” on that first day:
“Welcome to The Island Free Press, Hatteras and Ocracoke islands? first and only Web-based newspaper.
“The Island Free Press will cover the people, the issues, and the happenings that are constantly shaping our Hatteras and Ocracoke communities. It will cover and post the news as it happens, and its writers will explain the past, examine the present, and explore the future for residents and visitors alike. Writers familiar to island readers will cover everything from recreation to education, from policies to politics, and I will try to put all this in perspective in this column.
“This is your newspaper. It will speak to those of us who live here and those of you who own property here and don?t live here. It will be an important connection for all of you who are regular visitors and who carry the islands in your hearts and maybe hope to live here someday. And it?s also for all of you who may be coming here for the first time and need some ideas for planning your vacation. ”
In eight years, we’ve never run out of news to report and important issues to explore — issues that constantly challenge those of us who live on these islands.
We may be a small newspaper with a small staff covering two small islands, but we have had a big — and very rewarding — response from our readers.
We have a loyal following of readers who live on the islands and those who love to visit.
Our readership has steadily grown over the years.
For instance, in June, the month of the shark-bite incidents that captured the attention of the media nationwide, we counted 60,817 unique visitors who made 130,605 visits to our website and looked at 1.29 million pages.
It’s not quite that spectacular every month, but it’s very good. We had 44,222 unique visitors who visited the website 110,000 times in July and viewed 762,000 pages. In August, 36,000 visitors came to the site for 113,000 and viewed 694,000 pages.
We are grateful to all of our readers.
We thank all of our contributors — writers and photographers — who have consistently produced compelling content for Island Free Press. We are also grateful to our web support team at Hatteras Designs.
And, last but certainly not least, we thank our business supporters who have chosen to advertise on the Island Free Press website.
We could not publish this local newspaper without the backing of these businesses — almost every one of them is locally owned.
If you own a business and do not yet advertise in Island Free Press, please contact us. We need your support going forward. And it only makes sense for local businesses to support each other.
We know that advertising will bring you customers, and, perhaps just as important, it will allow us to continue to cover the community news that is important to you in ways that no outside media can or will.
I hope you think we have lived up to what we promised eight years ago. And, as we begin our ninth year of publication, I can’t think of much that I want to add to that.
PLEASE HANG WITH US
My partner, Donna Barnett, and I will both be offline for some technology updates for about a week at the end of September into the beginning of October.
We are pretty much the only two folks dedicated to keeping the newspaper up-to-date, day in and day out, so when we started, we vowed to never have health issues at the same time.
That has worked out pretty well for eight years.
However, now Donna is having an outpatient cardiac procedure, and I am having hip replacement surgery — my second one — which will keep me in the hospital for a couple days. And we’re having them the same week!
Both are pretty routine procedures these days, and we don’t expect to be out for very long.
Island Free Press will continue to cover the news with the help of several friends and colleagues. However, we might not be posting as many stories quite as often.
Please bear with us and keep checking back.
We shall return.
