Category: Shorebirds

CWF’s Larry Niles and his colleagues are on a two-week trip to northern Brazil to trap and band Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, and other shorebirds on their wintering grounds. We’ll be posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

Cannon netting in a remote place increases the odds of failure, and cannon netting in Brazil may be the most difficult of all. For one thing, cannon netting requires an enormous amount of equipment not easily available in places like northern Brazil. Take covering material, the opaque cloth that is widely available in the US to shade hothouses. We use it to shade the birds caught under a net to protect them from the sun and to calm them. After visiting many stores, we found something similar in São Luís, not equal to the need, but sufficiently suitable to be useful.

But for the igniters we use to fire the cannons, it’s a much different story. Even in the United States, the authorities tightly control their use for obvious reasons. Igniters are what miners use to blow up rock, and thus potentially dangerous in the wrong hands. As far as we know, they cannot be found in Brazil, and we can’t even receive them if we sent them from the US. Only a government official can do that, and our colleagues in Brazil were unable to get permission to do it.

We overcame this nearly insurmountable difficulty by going to the Internet. We soon learned how to create an igniter with small Christmas tree lights. Cut the glass top off of the light and charge with a minor electric current, and they pop like the real thing.

Worse yet is gunpowder. We use it to fire the projectiles that carry the net over the birds. Without it, we have no expedition. But in the South American countries in which we have worked, the authorities tightly control gunpowder. Here in Brazil you need a license, and forget about getting one if you are from the United States.

But we persisted, and after a bit of investigation, we learned that Brazilians use black powder in religious ceremonies. We would eventually find powder in, of all places, a religious goods store with a mix of religious iconography impossible to find in the US. Think Blessed Virgin Mary meets voodoo goat head devil god. As if blessed by the Holy Mother, we found all the powder we needed just beneath her benevolent and loving image.

In other words, to be successful in a cannon netting expedition, one must be resourceful. Ultimately it depends on two things: the team and the people in country that help you. This year in Brazil we are fortunate on both counts. Our Brazilian colleague, Ana Paula Sousa, is from the Universidad Federal de Maranhão and lives in São José de Ribamar, only five miles from our field station. We work under her banding permit and with her professor, Dr. Augusto Rodrigues. It was her that provided us with the field station we call home.

Ana’s generous nature comes naturally. Her father and mother Omar and Diva Sousa have been vital to overcoming the minor obstacles that seem to arise everyday when running an expedition in a rural area, from fixing the cranky generator and well pump to finding hard to find supplies like net-mending line and block ice. All this, and yet Mr. and Mrs. Sousa refuse our offers of compensation for their time. They do it because of their pride for their daughter’s chosen vocation, the native spirit of generosity, and their own big hearts.

 

For the original blog entry, see Larry’s post Down to Work.

Stay tuned for further updates!

CWF’s Larry Niles and his colleagues are on a two-week trip to northern Brazil to trap and band Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, and other shorebirds on their wintering grounds. We’ll be following him and posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

 

When most people think of Brazil, they think of Rio de Janeiro, a modern city that will soon host both the World Cup and the Summer Olympics. Or they may think of the Amazon jungle, and all the wonders of a wilderness alive with fascinating wildlife and plants that can found in no other place.

Except for an eight-hour layover in Rio, we are not going to these places. Instead, our home for the next two weeks will be Panaquatira, a tiny town on the northern coast about 250 miles east of the mouth of the Amazon. You could not imagine a more coastal town – the main street is the beach. Residents ride the mile-long strand to get to their modest homes in all but lunar tides, when the sea laps onto the stone driveways. The town is a resort for the working class, who mostly stay for the day, often arriving by bus to enjoy a frolic on the wave-washed sandy beach.

But we have not come to recreate. Our team of nine hearty souls will attempt to capture shorebirds that breed in the Arctic and winter here in the Maranhão state of Brazil. This forlorn and remote shoreline supports one of the most important concentrations of shorebirds in the hemisphere. Each year, thousands of red knots, ruddy turnstones, black-bellied plovers, whimbrels, and other species spend the winter here in a hot and humid climate that is the exact opposite of Arctic weather. Why do they winter here? What attracts them to this place? Where the Arctic do they breed? What other places are vital to their enigmatic lives? These are some of the questions we hope to answer.

Last year we trapped the beaches of Panaquatira and nearby island of Curupu. We caught red knots and ruddy turnstones with cannon nets and banded them with tiny devices called geolocators that track movement and store daily locations on a tiny memory chip. Geolocators are a digital treasure chest, but they can only be unlocked if we recapture the same birds and retrieve the devices.

Working in this remote place at the center of the world creates a challenge. What we call necessities are luxuries here, only available to a lucky elite. Everyone else struggles to achieve modest livelihoods at best. It’s a place where basic sanitation and clean water are still a modern improvement not yet available to the majority of the population; a place where warm-hearted and generous people must face persistent lawlessness, both in the street and in the halls of power. I fear the water, the parasites, and the thievery that the residents suffer with equanimity.

Don’t get me wrong. I live in New Jersey, less than an hour from Camden – one of the poorest places in the country and one of the “murder capitals” of the US. Still, we are threading a needle here. We don’t come as tourists, or on business per se. Panaquatira will be our home, and we must pull together a complicated effort that can only be successful with help and generosity of the residents. In return we hope to shed light on the circumstances of the birds and people of this wild and isolated place.

 

For the original blog entry, see Larry’s post Braving Brazil.

Stay tuned for further updates!

WINTERING PIPING PLOVER SURVEYS ON ABACO

By Todd Pover, Beach Nesting Bird Project Manager and Stephanie Egger, Wildlife Biologist

An integral part of this Bahamas trip entailed surveying several sites not previous covered on Abaco and revisiting some sites not checked since the 2011 International Piping Plover Census. Although we didn’t find large concentrations of piping plovers at any one new site, we did make some noteworthy discoveries.

One of the most exciting find was the resight of a piping plover that was banded on the breeding grounds last summer in Massachusetts as part of a flight behavior study. New Jersey also participated in this research and we briefly thought it might be one of the birds banded in our home state – but it turned out that it was banded (and nested) on Chapin Beach, Cape Cod and is wintering at Schooner Bay, Abaco (amongst 15 other piping plovers found on our survey). Continue reading “BAHAMAS PIPING PLOVER PROJECT”

Connecting with Piping Plovers in a New Setting

This trip to the Bahamas we had three volunteers, piping plover experts, to help us survey stretches of Abaco that we have either not been able to survey or had limited opportunity to survey in the past. Our volunteers have a wide range of experience ranging from the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, Pronatura Noreste A.C. Mexico, and a wildlife consulting company in Virginia. Below is their experiences from the week. Enjoy!

Annette Scherer, Retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Endangered Species Biologist

When I retired a year ago after spending the better part of my career negotiating with stakeholders and regulatory agencies to balance piping plover protection with shoreline stabilization projects and human recreational use, I often joked that I was going to move somewhere with no plovers- no piping plovers, no snowy plovers, and not even mountain plovers.  But when CWFNJ invited me along to survey for piping plovers in Abaco, Bahamas I jumped at the chance to learn more about piping plovers on their wintering grounds. My work with plovers in the northeast U.S. had focused on plovers on their breeding grounds where individual pairs of plovers fiercely defend their nesting territory. As a result, its unusual to see more than a pair of plovers and their brood of up to 4 chicks in a single spot. Here on the wintering grounds the bird’s habitat characteristics are very similar to that of their breeding areas – wide sandy coastal beaches, but their behavior is very different. The plovers congregate in small groups, roosting and feeding together. On my first survey day, I was thrilled to observe a group of eleven plovers roosting high on the beach. It was strange to see so many plovers calmly sitting together. Each bird was nestled down in a small depression that gave protection from the wind, reminding me of the shallow scrapes they make when building nests. It was great to finally see where the birds go when they leave the northeast and personally rewarding for me to now have observed the birds throughout their entire annual cycle. Continue reading “Volunteer Guest Bloggers – Bahamas Piping Plover Project!”

Eleuthera Edition

By Todd Pover, Beach Nesting Bird Project Manager
Stephanie Egger, Wildlife Biologist

Up until now, nearly all of our piping plover conservation work in the Bahamas has been focused on the island of Abaco.  One of the objectives of our Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund grant is to identify other islands and partners where and with whom the model we are developing on Abaco might be implemented as well.  With this in mind, we spent the past several days on the island of Eleuthera.

Although we believe the basic elements of our Abaco work are transferable to other islands, a “one size fits all” approach may not entirely work.  The various major islands are unified under the Bahamas flag, but each also has its own flavor, history, and way of life.  The best analogy would be that they operate much like the individual states in the U.S.

On Abaco, we have been partnering with Friends of the Environment, a non-profit organization with a strong education and outreach component to all of their work – not so different from what we do here at the Conserve Wildlife Foundation.  On Eleuthera we are hoping to partner with the Cape Eleuthera Institute (CEI) and The Island School.  Although education is at the core of their work as well, it is also different in that they carry out and support primary research and host visiting scientists and students at their campus. Continue reading “Bahamas Piping Plover Project”

The Bahamas Blog – Trip 1, Day 1

By Todd Pover, Beach Nesting Bird Project Manager and Stephanie Egger, Wildlife Biologist

Today we arrived on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas to start our piping plover project, which was made possible courtesy of a grant from the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund. It was mostly a travel day to for us, nonetheless, still exciting  to finally be here to start a project that was has been over a year in the planning.

We will hit the ground running tomorrow with a visit to a local school, participation in a round table discussion with stakeholders on tidal flats conservation, a piping plover survey, and filming for an educational video. And that’s just the first day!

So while we still have time to catch our breath, this is a good opportunity to review the purpose of our trip here.  Over the course of the past two decades, considerable resources have been put into the recovery of the Atlantic Coast population of piping plover, a federally threatened species, with most of the effort taking place on the breeding grounds in the U.S and Canada. Recent research has revealed that the vast majority of the population winters in the Bahamas. Furthermore, there is a growing realization that recovery and long-term sustainability will only occur with full life cycle conservation – protection during the breeding, migration, and wintering phases of the piping plover’s life. Continue reading “Plovers in Paradise”

CWF alumni guest blog

By Emily Heiser, Piping Plover Research Technician

Call me crazy, but the combination of piping plovers and New Jersey are just too much for me to resist! Over the last six years, I have spent the majority of my time working for Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey and New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife protecting piping plovers on their nesting grounds. Most recently I worked on a research project with the State University of New York-ESF that dealt with piping plover flight behavior in Stone Harbor, Avalon and Strathmere, New Jersey. The project’s graduate student, Michelle Avis conducted the other half of the study on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The project was specifically designed to look at piping plover flight patterns across their breeding grounds. The results of the study could have implications for the management of coastal wind turbine development. Continue reading “Overview of piping plover flight behavior research”

 

Wondering how you can learn more about shorebirds? Look no further.

 

Despite its part in one of the world’s most incredible migrations, the annual arrival of tens of thousands of shorebirds in Delaware Bay remains relatively unknown to many New Jersey residents. Only recently have shorebirds received some news coverage, but it’s not good news – their numbers are declining rapidly. Scientists have begun to fear that without concerted conservation efforts, species like the red knot may soon go extinct.

 

The Delaware Bay Shorebird Project, a study led by the New Jersey Division of Fish & Wildlife’s Endangered and Nongame Species Program, has documented shorebird activity in Delaware Bay for nearly thirty years. The result has been an extensive knowledge base that documents every aspect of shorebird life – from measuring food availability and weight gains to tracking migration routes and breeding success – in New Jersey and beyond. Now, as a longtime partner on this project, the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey is proud to introduce a new way to learn about these wonderful birds and the work underway to save them: a brand new shorebird site!

 

These new additions are loaded with content to bring you up to date on all the latest developments in the protection of shorebirds. Learn about these special birds on the Key Species page, and find detailed descriptions about their appearance, life cycle, and where to see them on their own pages in our online Field Guide. Check out the Media page for videos, photos, news articles, scientific publications, and more. Take an in-depth look at all the different areas of shorebird study currently underway on the Research page, and click on the Conservation page to discover how these birds are being protected. Finally, visit our Get Involved page to learn how you can become part of the efforts to help save these remarkable species from extinction.

 

Be sure to check out all the new additions at:  http://www.conservewildlifenj.org/protecting/projects/shorebird/

 

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 second-to-last day in the Arctic was rained out. A constant cold drizzle punctuated by brief downpours confined us to our tents, as the limited visibility would have made it impossible to spot Red Knots or their nests – or approaching polar bears.

 

But on our last day on Knot Plateau, we woke to a brilliant sunny day. While Rick, Steve, and Mandy broke camp, Josh, Mark, and I drove our ATVs out to the two knot nests we had found two days prior. As we had only banded one parent at each nest, we were hoping to find the unbanded birds this time. But the newly hatched knots and their parents had already left for the nearest wetland, and the incubating bird on the second nest was the bird already tagged with a geolocator. With nothing more to be done, we made our way back to camp to help finish packing.

 

It took two days to return to Coral Harbour and civilization. After staying the night with Josh and his family, we will begin our two-day journey by commercial flight back to Newark, anticipating the shift from 45 degrees to 95 degrees, but glad to be coming home.

 

The expedition was a success simply because we are all coming home safe and sound. But it was also a complete success because we achieved all of our primary goals. First, we established the presence of a new Red Knot breeding area from the ground. Second, we found a significant number of knots compared to our previous study sites on both Southampton and King William Islands, where most of the knot population had disappeared after the rapid decline in stopovers like Delaware Bay. Third, we finished the fieldwork needed to complete our range-wide mapping of rufa knot breeding habitat, which will help future investigations into Red Knot ecology. And finally, we attached the first geolocators to knots in the Canadian Arctic and set a firm foundation for a more successful effort in the future.

 

We are grateful to many people. The expedition would have been impossible without the support of Paul Smith of the Canadian Wildlife Service. The Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ, the Canadian Wildlife Service, Rutgers University, the Royal Ontario Museum, and The Steve Gates and Julie Fox Foundation all supported the expedition. The Coral Harbour Hunters and Trappers Organization provided essential support. Bruce McKitrick helped us with supplies. Finally we thank Joshua, Suzy, and their family for their hospitality. This expedition was only successful because of all of you.

 

For the full blog entries, see Larry’s posts: Arctic Rain, Our Last Day, and Summing Up Our 2013 Arctic Expedition.

 

 

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.

 

After 10 days in the field, 5 of them searching for knots, and with only one day before we must leave, we have at long last found knot nests – two, in fact. As we suspected, both still contained eggs, although one adult was also brooding a chick that was only hours old. Also as we suspected, we found them on small ridges in gravel-sized frost-cracked rock with very sparse vegetation.

 

There are fewer knots than the number of potential knot nesting sites in our study area, meaning the knots have two possible strategies when they choose a nesting site: they could be fanning out at very low densities, or they could be clustering and keeping a certain distance apart. Our experience at our first red knot study site suggested the latter possibility. In the first few years, when knot populations were still fairly high, knots occurred along ridges one kilometer apart. This fell apart as the number of knots collapsed in the period between 1999 to 2006, but our experience suggested knots will stay together and keep territories of about one square kilometer. In other words, knots like their space, but they still want neighbors.

 

So after finding the first nest, we started searching about 1 km away in adjacent habitat and soon found a second nest, corroborating our theory. But by then it was close to the end of the day and we had only an hour or so to search for a third. Finding none, we rode the 4 miles of hard trail back to camp with some satisfaction. We will try again tomorrow to find more in the area, but unfortunately it will be our last day.

 

Rain is falling against our tent, as it has through most of the night. Rain in the Arctic is always cold – more of a winter rain than one of summer. The knot nest with one chick will almost certainly have four by now, as it usually only takes 24 hours for all eggs to hatch. The adult will brood the chicks as best he can, but it’s not unusual for weather such as this to kill young shorebirds. This is one of many reasons why northbound stopovers like Delaware Bay must provide shorebirds with a good start every year.

 

If the rain abates, we will continue searching for nests tomorrow, but only time will tell whether our final day in the field will be a washout. Regardless, it is a wonderful feeling to have finally found what we came searching for.

 

For the full blog entry, see Larry’s post here.

Stay tuned for further updates!