Election day at home led to discussion in the Shorebird House as proxies had to be instructed. Then out to do resighting and surveys as we are in a new survey period, before showers and clean clothes to head up north (with a side trip to Bombay Hook in a thunderstorm for some) for our, now traditional, BBQ with Dave and Marg – a great time as usual, with food, drink, discussion and fireflies.
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So we still don’t have any Knot on this side of the Bay, but numbers are increasing in New Jersey. It seems that we maybe lost a lot of the Horseshoe Crab eggs with the nor’easter at the beginning of the season and the spawning hasn’t been good enough to fully replenish yet. The temperature is generally at a level that we can cope with, so not the normal highs over here. However, there clearly have been some Knot visiting us as we have recorded over 450 different individual Knot and seen some that have been marked in New Jersey this year.
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So the weather has improved on the whole, but we are still getting rain between being boiled alive in the humid atmosphere and eaten by bugs. We still have very few Knot on the Delaware side of the Bay, although we have heard there are over 10,000 on Reed’s Beach in New Jersey. The Horseshoe Crabs are spawning better now as it warms up so we are resighting Turnstone etc. and out looking for Knot appearing. Guy and Richard headed out to likely beaches to recce on Wednesday and Richard came up with an option at the bottom of Ted Harvey that would require two people watching the net – a plan was hatched to perch Richard on a hut and put Jacquie in a boat.
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It’s May again and members of the Wash Wader Ringing Group are heading to Delaware to resight and catch waders as part of the Delaware Shorebird Project. Group members have been helping out with the study since it’s inception in the late 1990s, contributing to both the fieldwork and the analysis and write up of the data collected. More about the study can be found here: http://www.dnrec.delaware.gov/fw/Shorebirds/Pages/default.aspx
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I have been working towards my cannon-net endorsement for just over two years, aiming to get to as many cannon-net catches as possible to gain experience in different kinds of scenarios, catching different species and being out in the field with various licence holders. Work, travel and home life often curtail the number of catches I would like to attend and up to now, due to the nature of my work, most of the cannon-net catches I have been involved in have been focussed on catching wildfowl species such as Bewick’s Swans, Pink-footed Geese and Red-breasted Geese. During September 2018, I was fortunate to find myself heading to China to assist global efforts in learning more about the Critically Endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper and it was on this trip, led by Wash Wader Ringing Group (WWRG) members, that my eyes were opened to the cannon-netting and ringing of wader species. For the first part of the trip, I was literally like a ‘duck out of water’ as I watched in awe the experienced team go about the planning, catching and processing of large numbers of Asian wader species.
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