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Recovering shorebird populations from the ground up: An update on the Coalitions for Shorebird Conservation

As a young teenage birder, my father regaled me with anecdotes about how bird populations had changed since his youth. At the time, the thirty-plus years of conservation efforts that restored some species to their historic population levels did not cross my mind. Now the realities of shorebird conservation underpin my every day, working with researchers and citizen scientists throughout the Western Hemisphere. Shorebird conservation is not for the faint of heart. From sleepless nights wandering grasslands in Uruguay to capture and band Buff-breasted Sandpipers (Calidris subruficollis), to trekking through rain-filled bison wallows in Kansas to count the various shorebird species using them as habitat, the effort required is tremendous. To learn about where shorebirds go, their needs when they...

For shorebirds, every quiet, peaceful moment counts

A Red Knot, traveling on a journey from South America north up to the Arctic tundra to nest, has a narrow time frame when the tide is just right for the sand to be moist enough for its nutritious food resources to be accessible. After feeding frantically, the bird must find a quiet, safe bit of sand to roost on, resting while it digests and converts that food into fat that will fuel its migration. While it rests, the bird will preen, ensuring that its feathers are in top form to fly thousands of miles or to dodge hungry raptors that it might encounter. But instead of finding that quiet, peaceful beach to do the work of being a Red...

Wallowing About in Search of Shorebirds

Thirty to sixty million big and shaggy American bison (Bison bison) once roamed North America’s Great Plains (USFWS). This enormous number of bison moved across the landscape, eating grasses, trampling and fertilizing the prairie, and pawing at and rolling about in the dirt. The latter behavior resulted in shallow depressions called bison wallows. Bison shaped their landscape by creating a patchwork of short grasses where the herd grazed, taller grasses where they hadn’t grazed, and disturbed, shallow depressions where bison wallowed the prairie to dust themselves for insect control. This process of altering the landscape’s surface through their activities means that bison were keystone species, supporting a greater variety of plants and wildlife through their grazing and wallowing behavior (Knapp...

Fall 2020 Banding Season, Week 2: August 24—28

The drought in the northeast has certainly been felt by the trees. We've noticed some branches of trees are holding the first hint of fall colors in their leaves. It also seems that we've been picking more leaves than usual out of the nets so early in the season. We finished the week with 94 new birds banded, 56 recaptures processed, and 12 new species for the week including Northern Waterthrush, Veery, and Yellow-bellied Flycatcher. Our two week total now is 260 new birds banded and 103 recaptures with 31 species captured so far. Heat and humidity returned in full force on Monday and Tuesday, each day we closed nets early as it got too hot to band. Gray Tree...

Five years of U360

Solving today’s complex global issues in a way that balances economic, social, and environmental concerns requires bringing together diverse groups of people. In particular, today’s college students and young professionals need to be actively engaged; that’s where Manomet’s U360 Business Sustainability Internship comes in. Today, there are countless opportunities for college students who want to complete an internship or experience real-world learning outside of the classroom. What distinguishes U360 from other options is its innovative approach of connecting students with small business owners for direct, real-world learning. “U360 has been primarily a virtual program since it started, so COVID-19 had little impact on last year’s interns completing the school year,” says Lora Babb, U360 program manager. “While it wasn’t quite...

Fall 2020 Banding Season, Week 1: August 17—21

Our first week of fall banding for the 2020 season is complete! After testing negative for COVID-19 and traveling under the restrictions that Massachusetts has put in place, the banders were ready for work. The jungle that had grown up along the net lanes during spring and summer has been fought back to make room for the 50 nets. Portions of the net lanes that are usually bare dirt are overgrown with low growing Path Rush (Juncus tenuis) from the lack of banders traveling the paths in the spring. We banded 166 new birds our first week; an even 100 of which were Gray Catbirds. The first bird we captured was a hatch-year Carolina Wren with a Gray Catbird not...

Building Coalitions for Shorebird Conservation: local actions for hemispheric protection

From the Arctic tundra to 4,000-meter-high Andean wetlands, from windswept Patagonian grasslands to the saltmarshes of Cape Cod, shorebirds are adapted to many extremes in nature. High altitudes, high temperatures, high salinity, high winds, deep mud, rocky coasts, freezing conditions, shorebirds can handle it all. An example of shorebird tolerance for extremes is the Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus). One population of these large brownish shorebirds spends September to April living in the tropical realm of mangrove forests in coastal Brazil. But by late May, the same individuals are pulling frozen cranberries from the snowy foothills of the Hudson Bay lowlands of eastern Canada after their northward annual migration. Even with this ability to adjust to such physical extremes, shorebirds struggle to...

Coalitions for Shorebird Conservation

Today, shorebirds are undergoing one of the most dramatic declines of any bird group worldwide. Recent studies show that we have lost more than one-third of all coastal shorebirds since 1970. To stabilize and rebuild shorebird populations and safeguard their vital habitats, Manomet has launched the Coalitions for Shorebird Conservation to accelerate and support targeted conservation efforts at 13 of the most important shorebird sites in the Americas. At each location, we are improving the quality and quantity of critical shorebird habitats and increasing local capacity for conservation action. Shorebirds face many challenges, including habitat loss and degradation, human disturbance, unregulated and illegal hunting, increasing predation, and climate change. These challenges are greater than any single organization can address alone....

2019 Annual Report

A Letter from Board Chair Nancy Dempze Dear Friends of Manomet, In August 2019, we launched our celebration of Manomet’s 50th anniversary—an historic milestone made possible by the generosity and dedication of our donors. Much has changed since August 4, 1969, when a single paid staff member and a band of volunteers opened the doors of the Manomet Bird Observatory for the first time. But what has not changed is our unwavering commitment to using science to better our world. Whether we’re collecting migration data, working to recover shorebirds and protect their habitats, preparing forests to adapt to climate change, or any of our other initiatives stretching across the Western Hemisphere, Manomet is first and foremost a science-based organization. But,...

Fisheries by the numbers

Spring and summer are a crucial time for our fisheries fieldwork. The data collected shows us what is happening in our waters from season to season and year-to-year. The numbers tell us many stories—some positive and some troubling: River herring—foundational species in freshwater and marine ecosystems—are much more abundant than in decades. Concerted efforts to remove dams and culverts that block passage to upstream spawning grounds have resulted in significant increases in spring migrations in several rivers and streams along the coast. Results on the St. Croix River, the boundary in eastern Maine between the US and Canada, illustrate how far we have come and how much opportunity to expand fish runs remains. Spawning migrations on the St. Croix reached...