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Summer Is Already Over (If You're an Arctic Nesting Shorebird)

Gregory Breese/USFWS bit.ly/2as1Hne
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Banded Red Knot

It may not feel like fall, but if you ask a migratory shorebird, they’ll tell you summer is over and it’s time to pack your bags and head south. Since early July, adults of the many species of Arctic nesting shorebirds that pass through our area have been massing on local beaches, mud flats, and salt marshes.

The short but epically productive Arctic summer has waned and with their chicks raised, these appropriately haggard looking adult sandpipers and plovers have abandoned their offspring on the tundra and started their long southwards migration without them. Later in the summer, gangs of their recently fledged chicks will have to find their own way south to the wintering grounds for their species, which could be as far away as Tierra del Fuego, near the tip of South America. Shorebird chicks make human children seem painfully needy – the shorebirds don’t have the option of moving back in with mom and dad after college. They will spend their first days of youthful independence dodging peregrine falcons and hurricanes – no keggers at Sigma Chi for them.

We’ll start to see these juvenile shorebirds in late summer, their plumages looking crisp and fresh compared with their parents who are all bedraggled from keeping Arctic foxes and jaegers from eating their children all summer. While I’m sure they could use a tropical vacation after all that, they still need to survive the gauntlet of predators, storms, and other hazards along their migration routes.

Places like the flats of Chatham, Nauset Marsh in Eastham, Chapin Beach in Dennis, Wellfleet Bay, Sandy Neck in Barnstable, and really any spot with some nice, protected intertidal flats can be worth checking. I’ve been hitting the flats of Mass Audubon’s Tern Island in Chatham, where, starting two hours after high tide, a couple thousand shorebirds can be found. Short-billed Dowitchers dominate the numbers, probing the flats frenetically with their long bills like feathered sewing machines. Much smaller Semipalmated and Least Sandpipers scurry among them, probing and picking with their relatively tiny bills. And Tern Island is one of the best places in the state to see the now Federally protected Red Knot.

These plump sandpipers with the intensely salmon-colored breast breed in the high Arctic and pass through our area from July through November on their way south. While they are famous for gorging on horseshoe crab eggs in Delaware Bay during their northbound flight in May, here they feed primarily on tiny juvenile mussels and small shrimp.

Researchers around the hemisphere have been studying Red Knots for years out of concern for their declining populations. The researchers attach little colored flags with visible characters on them that can be read by anyone with a decent spotting scope. If you happen to see a banded knot and get the code, it’s fun to enter them at a website called bandedbirds.org. Just plug in the species, flag color, and three character code, and you can see where else in the world your bird has been seen. From this website I learned that a knot that I saw at Tern Island on Friday was banded in New Jersey in 2011, and has been sighted as far away as the coast of Brazil.

The most famous Red Knot is B95, also known as the “Moonbird”, because at 20 years old, this bird has migrated at least 400,000 miles, or most of the way to the moon and back. Each annual round trip from Arctic Canada to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina is a mind-boggling 20,000 miles. With that kind of flying to do, you can imagine how important it is for them to have protected areas to feed like those provided by Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge and the Cape Cod National Seashore.

If you want a good chance of seeing Red Knots, we’ll be running some trips to Tern Island out of Wellfleet Bay in August. Maybe I’ll see you there! Or knot.

Mark Faherty writes the Weekly Bird Report.