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On a warm, buggy evening last week, several members of Diana Hamilton’s shorebird lab research team and I stood in a line several meters apart, advancing in slow squelching steps across a coastal New Brunswick mudflat. Our feet sank an inch or two (six, in the softer patches) in the exposed mudflat, the water that pooled in our prints reflecting the dimming sky.
In front of us were ranks of mist nets, which look basically like badminton nets with really fine mesh. And between the nets and us skittered our quarry: a flock of sandpipers. The little baseball-sized birds scurried back and forth over the mud, pecking and probing, gorging on this brief migratory stopover on the Northumberland Strait. They need to fuel up, fast. Just a few days previously, they were in the Arctic. By the time you read this, most of those birds will be in Brazil. They will have headed out over the Atlantic Ocean and flown for 72 hours straight—no stopping, no sleeping. But first, Hamilton’s lab needed to do some research on them, and that meant netting them. The only sound was the whisper of wind through nylon. And the squelching.
Then we clicked on our headlamps and bounded forward. Startled, the birds fled—directly into the invisible black nylon.
We ran along the nets, our headlamps lighting up pale smudges of feathers struggling suspended above the mud. When we found one, lab members freed it with the matter-of-fact dexterity of a doctor: slide the nylon down the wing bones like taking off a backpack, use a careful thumb to ease strands over the tiny feathered head, slip the kicking legs out backward.
As for the lone reporter in the midst of the professionals, when I wasn’t scaring birds, I was helping carry them from the net to a tent on shore where some of the lab members had set up a banding/blood drawing/weighing production line. I gingerly clawed my hand around one of the sandpipers (whose baleful gaze reminded me of a truculent teenage boy): pointer and middle finger collaring its neck like the safety harness on a roller coaster, thumb and ring fingers snugging its wings against its warm, round, little body, legs drumming at the heel of my hand, and squelched up the mudflat to the tent. I passed my indignant charge through the tent’s zippered flap, and in turn took a new bird, freshly banded and tagged, to be released.
I walked out under the huge red rising moon (a night past full) onto the flat, and opened my hand. Some birds flew off right away. Others stood dazed for a moment, unable to trust that after all that, they could just leave.
Around the world, shorebirds like these are winging it south this month, dodging hungry peregrine falcons, turbulent weather, and curious researchers. Yet as a group they’re facing a much bigger foe than any of these: their numbers are plummeting as they lose vital coastal habitat. My experience with the Hamilton lab on the shores of the Bay of Fundy and the Northumberland Strait gave me pause: shorebirds on the wing are a truly awesome natural phenomenon, and the thought of losing them is a dark one.
But those days also gave me hope: with research and insight into how birds use mudflats and what they need when they get there, maybe conservation can be effective.
Stay tuned for more on the birds in a couple of months.
Ami Kingdon
Staff writer and researcher |
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