New, weekly updates from New Jersey’s beach nesting bird project team
by Todd Pover, Beach Nesting Bird Project Manager
American oystercatcher Chick
It has been a busy week on the beach nesting bird project! We had our first least tern nests of the season, as the brief spell of warmer weather (finally) made for a burst of breeding activity. The first American oystercatcher nests hatched, so we have chicks on the beach now, as well.
Least Tern Nest
And there was a big spike in new piping plover nests all along the coast, so we were busy erecting “predator exclosures” to protect the eggs from predators, such as crows, cats, gulls, and foxes. While they are not effective or viable to use on every nest, these wire cage structures are one of our best management techniques to increase hatch success by deterring predators.
Piping Plover Exclosure
This week we will be even busier, as we make a mad scramble to protect the nests and colonies before the crowds of beachgoers arrive for the Memorial Day weekend!
One of a Series of Updates on the 20th Year of the Delaware Bay Shorebird Project
By: Dr. Larry Niles, LJ Niles Associates LLC
Shorebirds and no horseshoe crabs along the Bay.
It’s well known that the Delaware Bay shorebird stopover depends on horseshoe crabs, but few know that Delaware Bay is a near perfect horseshoe crab habitat.
There are many places on the eastern seaboard where horseshoe crabs breed. Most are too small to provide sustenance for energy-starved shorebirds. Places like Cape Romain Refuge in South Carolina have enough horseshoe crabs so that one breeding female unearths eggs of another and thus lays out a tidy meal for shorebirds. But the areas are small and at this time unimportant to the population of shorebirds. Most of the others are too small to have eggs reach the surface. Its only in Delaware Bay where crab numbers reach into the millions and spawn in such great numbers that they spread like a carpet over nearly all beaches from Gandy’s Beach to Villas, approximately 20 miles of spawning habitat. The number of eggs and ultimately hatched young reach staggering numbers.
Horseshoe crabs breeding at night.
The huge population of horseshoe crabs on the bay is no accident. The bay almost seems built to suit the crabs. Crabs need beaches with large and deep sand flats, allowing just enough water to sufficiently oxygenate the eggs without drowning them. They need the sea floor to gently rise into breeding beaches, allowing easy access. While breeding, crabs have to eat small bivalves, which they find in abundance in the bay’s extensive intertidal and subtidal flats.
Horseshoe crab eggs.
The most important aspect of the bay is its quickly warming waters in the spring. On Delaware Bay, horseshoe crabs don’t breed until waters reach 59 degrees. You won’t see this temperature on the Atlantic Coast until June. Not so on Delaware Bay! Although the bay has deeper water, mostly in sloughs that snake under the surface out to its mouth at Cape May, most of the water is relatively shallow — usually less than 18 feet. That may sound deep, but keep in mind the Chesapeake has 100 feet water for most of its length and deeper water throughout. The shallow water of Delaware Bay allows it to heat up soon after the air temperature rises.
Unfortunately, it also cools down quickly and because of this the crab spawn has stopped. The bay’s water temperature went up dramatically in late March and April, so much so that we worried it might reach the critical 59 degree threshold in April long before the birds arrived in May. But then the warm weather stopped and the bay temperature dipped than rose, several times in fact. By early May, it had gotten just above the threshold, heating up to about 61 degrees at the Cape Henlopen marine buoy. We hoped for the best. Crabs started to breed in good numbers on a few beaches, like Reeds Beach, but were thin elsewhere. We had about 20,000 shorebird relying on the spawn and the eggs that were brought to the surface.
Than the bay cooled down again. A nasty western wind and cold front enveloped our area over the weekend and the cool weather followed. By Monday, the temperature went down again and the crab spawn stopped. This is bad.
When the spawn stopped the birds hovered up the remaining eggs in a few days. Then they started wandering to find eggs in odd places, under houses, along bulkheads. Some even went to areas like the oyster aquaculture racks to find eggs to the delight of the people trying to expand aquaculture. But what they saw was desperation.
Herring gull hunting red knot, Cooks Beach, New Jersey. Photo by Jack Mace.
Worse the Black Back and Herring Gull that feed on eggs and overturned crabs couldn’t find eggs and started eating shorebirds. By the end of Thursday (May 19) we found 8 dead red knots. These gulls can swallow small sanderling and semipalmated sandpipers like gum drops, so we really don’t know how many shorebirds died.
Herring gull hunting red knot, Cooks Beach, New Jersey. Photo by Jack Mace.
Relief might be in sight though. Thursday, Friday and today will be warmer. The bay’s temperature is back up over 60 degrees. Thursday night we had a fairly good spawn. Hopefully we will be back in business soon.
Watch a Family of Bats LIVE on Conserve Wildlife Foundation’s BatCam
by: Stephanie Feigin, Wildlife Ecologist
Juvenile big brown bat that was banded last year has returned to the roost!
Early April 2016, the BatCambats returned to their roost in the window of the Williams’ home. As of now, it seems that only part of the colony has returned — about 20 big brown bats.
Last year CWF’s Stephanie Feigin and ENSP’s MacKenzie Hall banded the BatCam bats. We banded a total of 48 bats, about half of the bats banded were adults (banded with silver bands) and the others were juveniles (banded with red bands). This has allowed us to now see that some of the returning bats were banded last year. We even have some juveniles that have returned to the roost with their moms from last year!
Make sure to stay tuned for when the moms give birth to their pups in June and other updates throughout the season!
A Series of Updates on Year 20 of the Delaware Bay Shorebird Project
By: Dr. Larry Niles, LJ Niles Associates LLC
Our team trapped over 500 shorebirds over the weekend including several hundred red knots in two catches on May 12th and 14th! Most of the caught birds, knots, ruddy turnstones and sanderlings arrived in good condition, which is always a relief at this early stage in the season. Ruddy turnstones returned in better-than-average condition, weighing in at 5 grams higher than normal arrival weights.
Team banding ruddy turnstones on Reeds Beach.
The condition on arrival is an important focus of the project. In some years, knots struggled to get to the bay, coming in at average weights of 105 grams, 15 grams lighter than this year. One poor soul practically fell onto the beach with only 84 grams of weight, dangerously burning muscle to get here.
To really understand it best you must put yourself in the birds’ shoes (in a matter of speaking). We can do this because we have been attaching small tracking devices called geolocators on knots and turnstones for the last 5 years. Geolocators must be recovered to download the data, and we did this with a knot banded with the inscribed flag TVV in 2015. The map of that bird’s heroic journey can be seen below.
Delaware Bay, New Jersey, USA
Follow TVV’S path from Delaware Bay to its Arctic breeding area, then down to its Chilean wintering area, then back to Delaware Bay. It spent less than one month in the Arctic but over 6 months in its Tierra Del Fuego winter quarters. The rest of the time was spent flying or resting between flights. It’s flight from Southern Brazil to Delaware Bay was truly awe inspiring!
Imagine you are TVV and about to fly from balmy Brazil to Delaware Bay, 5,000 miles away. Most birds will leave near nightfall, when the weather is settled and usually when there tends to be a favorable wind. Once aloft you have no idea of the conditions you will face for the next 6 days. Some birds have an easy time of it, some get caught in opposing winds, others get blown off course and must struggle to return. This is the reason for the varying weights on arrival.
Red knot photo by Al Janerich.
So what did the birds find when they arrived this year? So far, the horseshoe crab spawn has gone well. It started early in the month, so that by the time birds like TVV arrived, they found a nice concentration of eggs for the taking on Delaware Bay beaches. At first, the birds poured into the bay. Last Thursday May 10th, we had about 1,000 knots on the New Jersey side of the bay. By Saturday, the number has grown to 8,000 knots – and our two catches proved they were gaining weight at a good clip.
All that changed on Sunday when a complicated cold front hit the bayshore. For two days we have had strong winds from the west, creating breaking waves on much of the New Jersey bayshore. The crab stopped spawning in most places. The winds blow as I write this blog and is certainly holding up birds from arriving, some may have stopped migrating others are fighting this merciless 30 mph wind.
Early morning on Pierce’s Point in a 30 knot wind from the west, blowing directly on shore and stopping all horseshoe crab breeding.
In our next post, learn how the winds affected the birds over the last few days.
We begin the 20th year of the Delaware Bay Shorebird Project this year with many of the same team members that helped start the project in 1997. That’s 20 years of studying one of the most intellectually challenging and endlessly fascinating species of wildlife in the world. Few have had the good fortune to do so.
The 2015 Delaware Bay Shorebird Project Team
Unfortunately, we do not start this year with the same shorebird population. In the last twenty years, the Delaware Bay stopover fell precipitously from its once lofty perch as one of the top three stopovers in the world. Where once we counted over 1.5 million shorebirds, we now see less than 400,000, a sweet number but far less than the bay’s heyday. Red knot numbers have crashed from over 90,000 to a low of only 13,000. Ruddy Turnstones, the virtual working man of shorebirds, fell from 135,000 to just over 16,000. In this time, many intrepid shorebirds came to the bay to find succor provided by a once endless bounty of horseshoe crab eggs only to find empty beaches and no way back to their Arctic home.
Much of this was caused by short-sighted decisions made by the commercial fishing industry in the 1990’s, which decided to spend this bay’s natural (and publicly owned) wealth of horseshoe crabs. They needed bait and relentlessly pursued the crabs. Horseshoe crab populations fell to a quarter of their historic number and may have been driven to extinction without the work of the bay’s conservationists who fought bravely and with determination to stop them. Atlantic sturgeon, weakfish, herring, eels, and many of the bay’s once abundant fisheries weren’t so lucky.
Now a new industry, the oyster aquaculture industry, wants to consume another public natural resource, the bay’s intertidal flats. Cultivating oysters on metal racks placed on the bay’s extensive tidal flats is cheap and easy when you can use public trust lands. The expansion got a vital assist from the state agencies who side lined crucial environmental reviews to determine impact to species like the red knot, and required no public hearing, comment period or the involvement of any shorebird experts. This could have been corrected when the red knot was federally listed.
Thousands of red knots, ruddy turnstones, sanderling, semipalmated sandpipers use the inter tidal flat near Kimble’s Beach, Delaware Bay. They forage on eggs washed out from the beaches and spread across the flat.
Unfortunately, the red knot’s federal listing has not helped in this controversial expansion of aquaculture. Instead, it proposed growers should be compensated for economic losses caused by the listing, and allowed the controversial expansion despite the obvious impacts to birds and crabs. Such decisions speak to Desperate Environmentalism, a term coined by Yale School of Forestry’s Joshua Galperin, describing the increasingly fraught position of conservationists who feel they must play ball with politically powerful industries or lose all. This desperate conservation could have been avoided if growers and conservationists worked together to expand aquaculture without significant impacts — because after all everybody loves oysters!
Horseshoe crabs rely on the intertidal flats to forage for marine invertebrate like small clams.
But this dark cloud cannot diminish the progress made by our team and groups like American Littoral Society and Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey. Just one example is the successful effort to restore horseshoe habitat on 2.7 miles of Delaware Bay horseshoe crab breeding habitat. The effort, funded by National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, overcame the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy and prevented what could have been another shorebird disaster. This work has blossomed over the last four years into a network of activities that provides new hope for a long term protection of the bay. This conservation is not desperate but inspirational for hundreds biologists, land managers and volunteers.
Moore’s Beach before and after restoration by the American Littoral Society and Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey.
So our 20th year is much like our first year, a group of conservation-minded shorebird scientists and volunteers gathering to help these poor birds find a way to make it home. As with most conservation stories in this time, it’s a David and Goliath story that hopefully has the same result.
Red Knot photo by Al Janerich.
Dr. Larry Niles has led efforts to protect red knots and horseshoe crabs for over 30 years.
Reflections on the Eagles of Atlantic County, New Jersey
by Larissa Smith, Wildlife Biologist/Volunteer Manager
Photo of Nacote on 4/8/2016 by Kelly Hunt.
It’s always a wonderful sight to see a bald eagle soaring up in the sky or perched in a tree. Today, if you live in South Jersey, the chances of seeing an eagle are pretty good. When I first began working with the New Jersey Bald Eagle Project in 2000, there were 25 nesting eagle pairs in New Jersey. Today, the State Endangered and Nongame Species Program along with Conserve Wildlife Foundation are monitoring over 160 pairs throughout the state! Needless to say, the eagle population is doing very well due to the recovery efforts and the team of dedicated New Jersey Eagle Project volunteers and supporters.
Today, there are seven known nesting pairs of eagles in Atlantic County. The longest residing pair in Atlantic County is the Galloway pair. Since 1996, the pair has raised and fledged a total of 29 chicks. During that time, the pair has moved their nest twice and the adults in the pair have most likely changed. Though eagles do mate for life, when one in the pair is injured or killed another is waiting to take it’s place. Jack Connor is one of our dedicated eagle project volunteers and has been monitoring the Galloway pair since they were first discovered in 1996. He has an intimate knowledge of this pair since he is out monitoring them every week during the nesting season. He has experienced the joy of seeing a chick(s) in the nest and the thrill of getting to hold one of those chicks at a banding. But he’s also had disappointment when a nest fails, which can happen during incubation or after hatching. In 2009, the nest collapsed and the two chicks didn’t survive. He has witnessed the determination of these birds to come back year after year.
In 2014, the chick at the Galloway nest was outfitted with a transmitter. This allows us to follow his movements after leaving the nest. The bird named ‘Nacote’ has been to Canada and back. He is now in Atlantic County and was spotted at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in April. Eagles reach sexual maturity at five years of age, so he has a few more years until he’ll start nesting. To follow Nacote’s movements, visit our website.
CWF is celebrating International Migratory Bird Day all Week Long
by Lindsay McNamara, Communications Manager
CWF’s blog on the American kestrel is the fifth in a series of five to be posted this week in celebration of International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD). IMBD 2016 is Saturday, May 14. This #birdyear, we are honoring 100 years of the Migratory Bird Treaty. This landmark treat has protected nearly all migratory bird species in the U.S. and Canada for the last century.
American Kestrel photo by Robert Lin.
In New Jersey, catching a glimpse of an American kestrel is a rare treat! These beautiful, colorful birds of prey are about the size of a mourning dove — they are the smallest falcon in North America. Kestrels are one of two falcon species that nest in New Jersey.
American kestrels are opportunistic hunters, feeding on a number of different animals like grasshoppers, lizards, mice, snakes and small birds. Unlike peregrine falcons, kestrels don’t use speed to kill their prey. They perch to see their target and then use a stationary, hovering flight that allows them to dive down short distances to capture their prey. The eyespots of a kestrel make it appear to be “looking” up at its aerial predators, like Cooper’s hawks, causing the predators to move on to find a less “alert-looking” target. The eyespots give kestrels the opportunity to focus on hunting for prey beneath them.
Kestrels also hide surplus prey in grass clumps, tree roots, bushes, fence posts, tree limbs, and cavities, to save the food for lean times or to hide it from potential thieves!
Kestrels utilize these hunting tactics in open, grassy habitats — especially ones with cavities for nesting and perches for hunting. Kestrels can be seen hovering in grasslands, pastures and parklands or perched along the road on telephone lines.
Kestrels can be found in both North and South America, from Alaska and Canada in the north to Argentina in the south. During winter in North America, they will migrate southward from the northernmost portion of their range. They live year-round within New Jersey.
Although the American kestrel is widespread, meaning they live year round throughout much of the United States, the northeastern kestrel population is declining. Today, the kestrel is listed as a threatened species in New Jersey.
The decline of kestrels in New Jersey is likely due to destruction of grasslands from development. Nesting cavities are also being lost. As humans clean up fields, we remove trees with nest cavities that kestrels use. Kestrels are secondary cavity nesters. They don’t make their own cavity but use existing natural or man-made cavities.
Since kestrels nest in buildings and other man-made structures, nest box programs are an effective way to help grow the number of kestrels in areas where nest sites are limited.
Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey, in partnership with the Endangered and Nongame Species Program implemented a nest box installation and monitoring program in 2006. Nest boxes have been placed in areas of habitat determined to be suitable for the birds of prey. The boxes are monitored by biologists during the breeding season. Because kestrels reuse nest sites, particularly if they have successfully raised young, we focus on boxes that have been successful at least once since 2006.
The nest box program in New Jersey appears to be successful; we are adding to the population. Since 2006, we have banded over 300 fledglings. You can help too! Next time you see an American kestrel in the Garden State, be sure to submit a Rare Species Sighting form.
CWF is celebrating International Migratory Bird Day all Week Long
by Lindsay McNamara, Communications Manager CWF’s blog on the great blue heron is the fourth in a series of five to be posted this week in celebration of International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD). IMBD 2016 is Saturday, May 14. This #birdyear, we are honoring 100 years of the Migratory Bird Treaty. This landmark treat has protected nearly all migratory bird species in the U.S. and Canada for the last century.
Great blue heron photo by Howie Williams.
Have you seen a great blue heron wading in the marshes of the Garden State? While they are commonly seen along shorelines, river banks, and the edges of marshes, estuaries, and ponds, the breeding population of these wading birds is actually listed as a Species of Special Concern in New Jersey.
The term ‘Species of Special Concern’ applies to wildlife species that warrant special attention because of some evidence of decline, inherent vulnerability to environmental deterioration, or habitat modification that would result in their becoming a Threatened species.
Great blue heron photo by Howie Williams.
Due to its wide distribution, varied diet, and flexibility in nesting near both freshwater and saltwater environments, the great blue heron’s population in North America is stable. However, wetland destruction in New Jersey has caused a decrease in heron populations from their historic numbers. Since the 1950s, habitat loss has occurred at an alarming rate in New Jersey, destroying wetlands critical to breeding herons.
Protecting our wetland habitats from disturbance and development will help protect the great blue heron, the largest wading bird in North America. Great blue herons are 46 inches long and have a wingspan of 72 inches. Despite their large size, great blue herons only weigh 5 to 6 pounds, in part because of their hollow bones — a feature all birds share.
Great blue herons can hunt during the day and night, thanks to a high percentage of rod-type photoreceptors in their eyes that improve night vision. They eat nearly anything within striking distance, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, insects, and other birds. Herons nest in colonies or “rookeries” in tall trees near bodies of water.
The oldest great blue heron on record was found in Texas when it was at least 24 years, 6 months old!
The great blue heron occurs throughout most of North America, from Alaska and eastern Canada in the north to the northern portion of South America in the south. Northern populations of great blue herons east of the Rockies are migratory.
They withdraw from the northernmost portion of their range during the winter, some traveling to the Caribbean, Central America or northern South America. This species breeds throughout New Jersey. They generally do not occur within the northwestern corner of the Garden State during winter. Great blue herons migrate singularly or in small flocks, mainly in daytime.
We still have much to learn about the biology and population status of great blue herons in New Jersey. Research needs to be conducted to find additional breeding sites, check existing nesting areas, and determine whether the population might be decreasing or increasing. You can help! Next time you see a great blue heron in the Garden State, be sure to submit a Rare Species Sighting form.
CWF is Celebrating International Migratory Bird Day all Week Long
by Lindsay McNamara, Communications Manager
CWF’s blog on the red knot is the third in a series of five to be posted this week in celebration of International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD). IMBD 2016 is Saturday, May 14. This #birdyear, we are honoring 100 years of the Migratory Bird Treaty. This landmark treat has protected nearly all migratory bird species in the U.S. and Canada for the last century.
Red Knot photo by Mark Peck.
The iconic red knots have returned to New Jersey! These famous, mid-sized shorebirds are state endangered and now federally threatened— the first bird ever listed under the Endangered Species Act with climate change cited as a “primary threat.”
Red knots are only 10 inches long but are among the world’s most extreme long distance flyers — traveling vast distances — some over 18,000 miles in the course of their annual migration from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina all the way up to the Canadian Arctic (and back again). During their trip, the red knots make a vital stop at New Jersey’s Delaware Bay.
This map shows the flight path of a red knot that was banded and fitted with a geolocator along New Jersey’s Delaware Bay.
Each spring in Delaware Bay, throughout the month of May, the largest concentration of horseshoe crabs in the world comes onshore to spawn. At the same time, tens of thousands of shorebirds arrive at the Bay, thin and spent from what has been a non-stop, four-day flight from South America. They are en route on a remarkable round-trip journey from southern wintering grounds to Arctic breeding territory, and Delaware Bay is their most critical stopover on this 8,000-mile trip. The shorebirds need to quickly double their weight to complete their migration north and breed successfully. To refuel at such capacities and in only a ten-day window, high-energy horseshoe crab eggs provide essential nourishment. In recent years, countless horseshoe crab eggs have been lost because of the devastating storms that swept away the beaches they depend on.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Conserve Wildlife Foundation and American Littoral Society worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife and the New Jersey Recovery Fund to remove 8,000 tons of debris and added 45,000 tons of sand to the beaches just before the annual spring arrival of the red knot in 2013. Additional work after 2012 restored another mile of shoreline, including two new beaches of poor quality even before Sandy. To date, the groups have placed over 85,000 cubic yards of sand and restored seven beaches along New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore.
To restore one of the beaches, Thompsons Beach, our team removed debris from the area, removed rubble from the road leading to the beach, and placed over 40,000 cubic yards of sand onto the beach. We were delighted to learn that in the spring of 2015, Thompsons Beach had the highest abundance of horseshoe crab egg clusters out of all the beaches that our team monitors on Delaware Bay.
Horseshoe crabs spawning at Thompsons Beach in May 2015. Photo by Joe Smith.
But since the early 1990s, there have been major declines in both the number of adult horseshoe crabs and their eggs. The cause is an exploding crab harvest that grew from only tens of thousands in 1990 to over 2 million in 1996. With the decline of their critical food source, shorebird numbers also plummeted — the Delaware Bay shorebird populations remain around 26% of its historic population size. Over 25,500 red knots were seen in 2015 versus over 90,000 in 1989.
Conserve Wildlife Foundation and the Endangered and Nongame Species Program (ENSP) of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Fish & Wildlife have partnered for 20 years, working to conduct research on Delaware Bay shorebirds in order to prevent further decline. Each year, CWF’s Larry Niles and ENSP’s Amanda Dey lead a team of shorebird experts from around the world – from countries as far as Argentina and New Zealand – to conduct research on shorebirds during their stopover. These experts also follow shorebirds to other locations along their migration, including South America and the Arctic. With scientific research and concerted conservation efforts, our hopes are that someday Delaware Bay’s skies will be once again filled with shorebirds.
Red Knot photo by Mark Peck.
Last year, nearly every red knot left the bay in good condition, with over 77% reaching weights exceeding 180 grams, the threshold weight required for a successful flight to the Arctic breeding areas. The improvement in the number of red knots reaching 180 grams is a milestone for our shorebird project. The birds left in the best condition recorded since 1998, just as horseshoe crabs were being overharvested. This good news must be tempered by the continued low numbers of birds and horseshoe crabs. We report no improvement in horseshoe crab numbers, so the improvement in the number of red knots making weight is likely a consequence of the restoration of horseshoe crab habitat on Delaware Bay beaches.
Because shorebirds don’t only spend their time in Delaware Bay, shorebird scientists must study them throughout the Atlantic Flyway to get the best understanding of their unique ecology. This year, shorebird project team was awarded a 2-year grant to create detailed shorebird habitat maps in the states of Maranhão and Pará, Brazil. This project will set the foundation for conservation planning and action for decades to come at a shorebird wintering site of hemispheric importance that has received little conservation and research attention with regard to shorebirds thus far.
Over the last 6 years, CWF also has partnered with the USFWS Monomoy Refuge to develop a better understanding of migratory shorebird use on Cape Cod and at the Refuge. Cape Cod, like Stone Harbor and Brigantine, New Jersey, is an important southbound stopover for red knots. At each location, red knots come from their Arctic breeding areas and either build up weight for a flight to South America, or remain to molt and replace vital primary feathers before moving onto shorter distance wintering areas in Florida and Cuba.
Banded Red Knot photo by Mark Peck.
Another important piece of CWF’s shorebird research has been the attachment and recovery of geolocators, small devices that track movements through one to two years of battery life. The migratory tracks from recovered geolocators have greatly expanded our understanding of red knot migratory behavior. In CWF’s last two years of research, we focused on capturing juveniles, which move through the Cape in early September. Red knot juvenile #254 was a recapture two years after release on Delaware Bay. It first left Cape Cod and wintered in North Carolina. In their first year, juvenile red knots don’t go to the Arctic to breed and so #254 flew back to Cape Cod to summer. The following fall, it flew to Cuba to winter, then to North Carolina, then to the Arctic. This was the first known track of a juvenile red knot and one of only a few of any avian species!CWF is continuing our geolocator project this year, so follow along on our blog and social media channels to receive updates on cutting-edge red knot research!
CWF is Celebrating International Migratory Bird Day all Week Long
by Lindsay McNamara, Communications Manager
CWF’s blog on the piping plover is the second in a series of five to be posted this week in celebration of International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD). IMBD 2016 is Saturday, May 14. This #birdyear, we are honoring 100 years of the Migratory Bird Treaty. This landmark treat has protected nearly all migratory bird species in the U.S. and Canada for the last century.
Piping plover photo by Steve Byland
The piping plover – a small sand-colored shorebird that nests in New Jersey as part of its Atlantic Coast range from North Carolina up to Eastern Canada –weighs only one to two ounces and is about six to six and a half inches long. These tiny shorebirds migrate all the way to their wintering grounds along the coast of eastern Mexico and on Caribbean islands from Barbados to Cuba and the Bahamas.
Migrants can be seen in New Jersey from early March to late April and again from mid-July to the end of October. Females are the first to leave the breeding grounds, followed by males, then juveniles. Breeding plover “hot spots” in each coastal county of New Jersey are Gateway National Recreation Area – Sandy Hook Unit, Barnegat Light, North Brigantine Natural Area and Stone Harbor Point.
We see a number of migratory piping plovers in New Jersey because the Garden State is roughly in the middle of their breeding range. Todd Pover, CWF’s beach nesting bird project manager, reasons that we have a high number of Eastern/Atlantic Coast Canadian breeders that stop in New Jersey — based on band resights — albeit usually for just a day on their way north to breeding grounds. Therefore, New Jersey may play an important role in the piping plover life cycle not just for breeding, but for migration as well, which emphasizes the importance of protecting shorebirds in all phase of their lives or “full life-cycle conservation”.
Piping plovers face a number of threats, including intensive human recreational activity on beaches where they nest, high density of predators, and a shortage of highly suitable habitat due to development of barrier islands and extreme habitat alteration. Sea level rise and increased storm activity related to climate change will also likely lead to more flooding of nests.
Federally listed as a threatened species in 1986, piping plovers have since recovered in some areas of the breeding range. Yet piping plovers continue to struggle in New Jersey, where they are listed by the state as endangered. For more information about piping plover nesting results in New Jersey, please read Conserve Wildlife Foundation’s 2015 report.
Piping plover chick, photo credit: Asbury Park Press/Nancy A. Smith
CWF, in close coordination with NJDFW’s Endangered and Nongame Species Program, oversees piping plover conservation throughout New Jersey. Staff and volunteers help erect fence and signage to protect nesting sites, monitor breeding pairs frequently throughout the entire nesting season from March to August, and work with public and municipalities to educate them on ways to minimize impacts. Although conservation efforts on the breeding ground remain the primary focus, in recent years, CWF has also begun to work with partners all along the flyway, in particular on the winter grounds in the Bahamas, to better protect the at-risk species during its entire life-cycle.
We are working hard to link students across the piping plover’s flyway through our Shorebird Sister School Network, where we pair up schools in New Jersey and the Bahamas, one of the most important wintering areas for Atlantic Coast piping plovers. Now, we are hopefully recruiting some Canadian students as well.
Conserve Wildlife Foundation will continue to find innovative ways to save the small migratory shorebird. In 2015, 108 pairs of piping plovers nested in New Jersey, a 17% increase from 2014. What will 2016 bring? Follow us on social media to learn more about the tireless efforts of a team of passionate, dedicated biologists working to save the iconic coastal species.
Kestrels can be found in both North and South America, from Alaska and Canada in the north to Argentina in the south. During winter in North America, they will migrate southward from the northernmost portion of their range. They live year-round within New Jersey.
The great blue heron occurs throughout most of North America, from Alaska and eastern Canada in the north to the northern portion of South America in the south. Northern populations of great blue herons east of the Rockies are migratory. 
