CWF’s Larry Niles is in Northern Canada searching for Red Knots and other shorebirds in their Arctic breeding territory. We are following him and posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.
Our camp here on knot plateau is spartan. We had to jettison many of the luxury items, like the cook tent, so that we would need to make the 25-mile ATV trip into the plateau only once. Even then, the ATVs were overloaded, and we had numerous problems like flat tires and a cracked support for the back rack.
At this point in our trip, the rigors of conducting daily field work and sleeping on therm-a-rest mattresses in unheated, low-ceilinged tents are starting to wear us out. Of course, much of this is age-related. The author of this blog, being on the older side of the crew, finds the need to get dressed in a tent the size of a refrigerator box to be the most difficult part of our field experience. Ironically Joshua, the youngest of our crew, has a small campaign tent in which he can stand.
But complications such as these are minor compared to what we have discovered: numbers of knots at least equal to the high densities we saw years ago. Better yet, the amount of potential nesting habitat on knot plateau is far greater than other Arctic sites we have surveyed because the knots here are nesting in much greater profusion. This plateau is perfect nesting habitat because these potential nesting sites are surrounded by wetlands where the newly-hatched young can feed, and the complex is also within 10 kilometers of the Sutton River basin. The river remains clear almost year-round, making it a perfect feeding spot for the adults while the nesting area is still frozen.
The greater area of habitat, however, causes great difficulty in finding nests, and it doesn’t help that knot nests are the notoriously hard to locate to begin with. Most shorebirds react to intruders on approach because both adults stay near the nest. But Red Knots, on the other hand, don’t react to intruders because one adult is elsewhere feeding and the incubating bird won’t leave the nest until he is almost stepped on. So far, we have found the nests of several shorebird species such as American Golden Plover, Semipalmated Sandpiper, and Dunlin, as well as those of other birds like Long-tailed Jaegers – but so far no knot nests.
Our mapping work is going well and may yet prove the most valuable result of this trip. Under Rick’s guidance we are ground truthing interpreted satellite images that already distinguish tundra habitat with good precision. Our task is to train the map to distinguish habitat important to knots. In the end we will create a precise mapping of optimal knot habitat.
All in all, we still have a lot of work to do and not much time left to do it. But even though we have yet to find the knot nests we came for, we cannot help but be pleased by what we have already found.
For the original blog entries, see Larry’s posts Knot Plateau and The Search Continues.
Stay tuned for further updates!