Dear Shorebird Team

With only small groups of knots and turnstones still on the NJ side, we closed the main house, and we intend to trap only if new birds arrive. So far, we are down to about 300 knots at Norbury’s landing, 350 knots at Thompson’s beach, and a scattered few more in various places. Ruddy Turnstone’s numbers are similar. We will conduct a boat count tomorrow, June 2, and continue scanning these flocks this week to ensure we see newly arriving birds.

Fletcher Smith from GA and Felicia Sanders from South Carolina, Jim Fraser and Brian Watts from VA report normal numbers in late April and early May. So no big groups of birds finding a new stopover.

Unless more birds come in, The Delaware bay stopover population has declined from a recent high of over 30,000 birds to just under 7000. If this year compares to the losses documented by Allan Baker in his 2004 paper, the population may have suffered 37% mortality.

Knowing the cause is vital. At this population level, the stopover could fail altogether. Stopovers have collapsed in many places on the knot’s 10,000 mile-long flight path. The same is true for stopovers around the world. And it’s hard not to forget we are also in the middle of a global extinction crisis like few others. Rufa knots, especially long-distance red knots, could be lost. We must do our best to understand a cause or group of causes on which we can act.  I will discuss this in my blog.

Nearly one and a half million new adult female horseshoe crabs enter the bay’s population every year, yet the numbers of females, according to the Virginia Tech Trawl, have not gone up in the 20-year life of the survey. The agencies report a kill of around 100,000 adult females a year but don’t ask the obvious question – who or what is killing the remaining 1.4 million adult females each year?  It should be clear from recent developments in SC, that regulation is loose and compliance poorly monitored.  Perhaps the only reasonable way is to restore the population to carrying capacity is to close down the female kill altogether until the numbers of adult females and eggs start rising.

We should focus on this simple request. We should be managing the bay’s population of horseshoe crabs for the worst conditions the bay can unfold. We can’t stop bad winds or cold water, but we can expand the population of horseshoe crabs, so birds arriving in most of these conditions find an abundance of horseshoe crabs eggs. It’s a simple prescription – stop the killing of female horseshoe crabs.

Larry Niles