Lanny McDowell Avian Art » red knots

State of the Union at Global Conservation Alliance

Lanny McDowell — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:42:26 +0000

Here is an update on where we stand right now. By the way, the new name for our shorebird project within GCA is The Red Knot Survival Project.

I was just reading about non-profits and who gives to them, who the supporters are. Well it turns out that 75% of the money donated comes from private individuals. That is pretty astounding, and also encouraging. As of this writing, Global Conservation Alliance has received money donations from various individuals, from one corporate contributor and from one conservation organization donor.

GCA members have traveled to Delaware Bay to work there the last two years, in 2008 and 2009; and we anticipate going back this year. Our target dates are May 22 until June 1st. The full moon, when horseshoe crabs gather in the most dense numbers to lay their eggs, because the higher tides of the full and new moons take them further up the beach, occurs on the 27th of May this year, right in the middle of our stay. Also, it happens that the historical departure date for Red Knots leaving en masse for the Arctic occurs on some afternoon between the 27th and the 29th of May.

Back to the money. This is the first year that it was clear to the GCA founders that we cannot go to the Cape May beaches without soliciting and getting significant outside financial support. The days of financing our work out-of-pocket – that’s three people paying their own way to get to southern New Jersey, rent space to live while there, eat, do the work and basically ignore their obligations back home – are gone. That approach is no longer practical. It is not just a function of the overall economy. It is a consideration of the expanded scope of our projects. If we are to move forward with our mission to pro-actively and measurably improve the status of the Red Knot and other migrating shorebirds, we need to spend another season conducting studies designed to quantify how our innovative methods can actually result in improved departure weights for the birds.

Personal aside: As someone who is more of a naturalist by context than by formal education, whose appreciation of natural phenomena is mostly experiential via birding and avian photography, as opposed to scientific training in biology and ecology, my patience is challenged by the notion pervasive in the scientific culture that one has to prove the obvious to earn the credibility that allows one to progress to the point of applying real solutions to a problem. In this case the “problem” is that rufa Red Knots are losing ground to possible extinction. My two colleagues in GCA are more attuned to the scientific method and the bureaucratic demands required of those who want to participate; and they balance my urge “to get on with it”. This is a roundabout way of saying that, however much I would like to leap directly into implementation, GCA has another season of research to complete before we can supplement the shorebirds’ natural food stocks (horseshoe crab eggs) at a scale sufficient to make a measurable difference.

Back to the money, again. Here is our very modest financial situation. Thanks to the generous efforts of two individuals, GCA is able to pay for submission and accounting fees associated with applying for tax-exempt status. We have money left over, just, to commit to a house rental in Cape May Courthouse to house the crew for ten days this May. Beyond covering those inescapable expenses, GCA needs to raise funding to underwrite the 2010 projects. Funding implies which projects can be designed and accomplished; and the projects imply the funding. Thus funding and project design are inter-dependent. Applications for permits to work on the beaches are also dependent on funding and project design, and vice-versa.

GCA has developed two budget goals, both practical and both doable. The first budget provides the absolute bare minimum for being on site for ten days and carrying out a project to measure how much more volume of horseshoe crab eggs is consumed by shorebirds when the beaches are plowed to expose more eggs. We are also actively looking for other research studies to run in tandem with ours to help assess how increased egg exposure and egg predation by the shorebirds may result in weight gain (grams of fat) for the birds. This budget comes in at $9,685.

The second budget is for a longer stay, to bracket both the new and the full moon dates, and provides for broader testing and the completion of a second project, which involves supplying an alternative food source to distract Laughing Gulls competing with shorebirds for the horseshoe crab eggs. This budget also includes money for administrative costs, for the first time in three years. This budget, the one we really hope to reach, is for $44,300. Details of both budgets can be had for the asking.

I have read that if there is a ratio of more than 50% of an organization’s funds going to administrative costs, that is too high. And also that, according to the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance (at www.give.org), they suggest that no more than 35% of funds be put back into fund-raising. For the record, GCA has dedicated zero per cent (0%) of funds received into fund-raising or administrative costs. This has a nice, clean ring to it, for the time being, but it is not sustainable, unless someone with the time and the will volunteers to do it!

The Appeal: The Red Knot Survival Project needs supporters now desperately, to ensure that our programs will continue, to fund our work this coming May. It is not that far away. Remember, our sole mission at GCA is to develop and implement programs that result in the Red Knot and similar shorebirds leaving on their flights to the Arctic with more fat reserves than they would have without our help. Perhaps the man most knowledgeable about the ecology of the Red Knot, Brian Harrington, who is also a consultant to GCA, has advised us, “Make sure it remains about the birds, and does not become just about the people.” We take this advice to heart. We keep that goal in sight. If the rufa Red Knot suffers more declines and cannot recover, we will all wonder how we could have done more to save them.

If you can help, or you know an individual or an institution that can help, please be in contact with GCA about it. My email address is blkwtrbrk@comcast.net (copy & paste). Please ask us about specific budget items you would like to cover for us, such as $1,000 for housing for ten days in May, or $1,500 for transportation costs to get us all to Cape May this year. We can find something large or small to fit your donation dollar amount and put that money to work directly and specifically.

Donations may be sent to Porter Turnbull, President of Global Conservation Alliance, 59-168A Kamehameha Hwy., Haleiwa, Hawaii 96712. Right now, donations can be made by check. Soon GCA’s website will be up; and there you can make contributions the modern way, with your credit card or Paypal account. However, please do not wait for the website!

If you are unfamiliar with our work, there are three pages at this blog which show and tell about our work at Delaware Bay. Find this information by clicking on any of these web addresses:

For a pictorial review of the 2009 field season, go to:

http://ottgallerymv.com/lannymcdowellavianart/index.php/global-conservation-alliance-2009-season/

For a general introduction to our mission and why we want to help the Red Knot, go to:

http://ottgallerymv.com/lannymcdowellavianart/index.php/global-conservation-alliance-2010-donorgrantor-introduction

and

http://ottgallerymv.com/lannymcdowellavianart/index.php/crusade/

Thank you so much for reading this appeal. Please let me know how you want to help. Time’s awasting!

Lanny McDowell for Global Conservation Alliance and The Red Knot Survival Project.

Disclaimer: These pages are not intended to have commercial connections with Lanny McDowell Avian Art, the name of this blog. The pages for GCA are located here as a matter of convenience, in the absence of a dedicated website for The Red Knot Survival Project at this time.

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more bird photography for Lan and shorebird research for GCA happening after all …

Lanny McDowell — Sat, 23 May 2009 11:05:08 +0000

All three of us had pretty much given up on getting to the Jersey shore during spring migration this year. It looked like our non-profit, Global Conservation Alliance, was going to be a blowout for 2009, which , if that did not concern Red Knots and other declining stocks of migrant shorebirds, might not be such a big deal in itself; but wasting a year would have been a real shame in this case.

In order to have a chance of carrying out work on the beaches of Delaware Bay that might result in healthier (and heavier) Red Knots leaving on the last northern leg of their annual journey up to the Arctic, certain scientific requirements need to be met. If anyone wants to access the restricted beaches where the birds feed, or if anyone wants to physically disturb the surface of those beaches, they have to apply for and receive permits from the state powers that be to do that work. You can’t just show up and start digging up the sand.

Norm Famous, one of our number who is a wetlands ecologist by profession, put together GCA’s application to New Jersey Fish & Wildlife to conduct two experiments both of which we intend to complete during this next week, right at the tail end of the period that the knots , turnstones, dunlin and other migrants are still feeding on the bay shores: within numbered plots about 6 feet by 15 feet we will rake up the beach surface where there are horseshoe crab nests, at different depths, taking core samples and counting the number of eggs before and after the surface is turned over and also observing the reaction of the feeding birds to the disturbed areas; secondly, we will feed gulls with other food products, principally Laughing Gulls, also within prescribed plots, to assess how this distraction of the gulls reduces their competition with shorebirds for the crab eggs.

Anyway, the applications were just now, as of two days ago, approved and the permits issued. So it’s a go! Late maybe, but some major last minute scrambling by the three GCA partners, including Porter Turnbull flying in from Hawaii and Norm Famous coming down from Maine, will get us down to New Jersey by this Tuesday to hit the beaches running and, hopefully, get these experiments under way before the birds decide to head out, which could be quite a sight in itself, if you are lucky enough to be on site when they lift off. At least two other hardy souls will join us for at least part of the week we are there to help with manpower and equipment.

There will be more on this subject to share with you when I get back home to Martha’s Vineyard around the second day of June. Stay tuned.

I just had to throw in a pair of oversized shots for all the detail, even though it looks a little strange with all the print overtop. These two are from the shores of Cape Cod Bay on Chappaquiddick Island:

I have a list of folks who get an emailed notice from me with a URL to click on when I have posted a new blog. There are also times when I just send out photos to the list without bothering to blog about them or post them to a listserve. Not on the list? Want to be? Just contact me (below right) saying you want to be on the list or, better yet, subscribe to Feedburner above, in the right side column for automatic blog feeds to your email. Getting off the list is just as simple.

These images and Avian Art fine art prints are available for purchase. Contact me or View my gallery.

Birds are cool! Lanny

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Red Knots Endangered, just knot officially

Lanny McDowell — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:51:38 +0000

Here is an excerpt from the American Bird Conservancy’s report about the current status of Endangered Species Listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, thanks to Betty Andersen:

Government Review Confirms Red Knot and Other Imperiled Bird Candidates Should Be Listed as Endangered Species

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has released its revised list of species that are candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Designation as a candidate species is not a requirement for listing under the ESA, and FWS can, and regularly does, list animals and plants without first placing them on the Candidate List. As a result, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has released its revised list of species that are candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Designation as a candidate species is not a requirement for listing under the ESA, and FWS can, and regularly does, list animals and plants without first placing them on the Candidate List. As a resultthe Candidate List is regarded by many conservationists as a stall tactic by FWS.

Candidate species are assigned a listing priority from 1 to 12 based on the magnitude of threats they face, the immediacy of the threats, and their taxonomic uniqueness (for example, full species have higher priority than subspecies). The species’ listing priority dictates the relative order in which proposed listing rules are prepared, with the species at greatest risk (listing priority 1 through 3) being proposed first. Significantly, in the 2008 list, FWS determined that the ranking for the Red Knot should be raised from 6 to 3.

The rufa Red Knot, a reddish-brown shorebird slightly larger than an American Robin, migrates annually from Tierra del Fuego to its arctic breeding grounds, stopping to rebuild critical energy reserves by feasting on horseshoe crab eggs in Delaware Bay.

Only 14,800 Red Knots were counted in 2007 at the species’ primary wintering areas, a 15% decline from 2006, and a 75% decline from 1985. The results of several scientific studies have shown that a major reason behind this decline is a fall in the number of available horseshoe crab eggs due to overfishing of the crabs themselves, which are used as bait in conch and eel fisheries. This led FWS to conclude in their candidate review that, “The primary factor threatening the Red Knot is destruction and modification of its habitat, particularly the reduction in key food resources resulting from reductions in horseshoe crabs…”

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has once again confirmed that the Red Knot is increasingly threatened with extinction and deserving of heightened conservation measures, particularly immediate reductions in the commercial harvest of horseshoe crabs, whose eggs comprise the knot’s primary food source,” said Darin Schroeder, American Bird Conservancy’s Vice President of Conservation Advocacy.

The increased priority ranking for the species from 6 to 3 may speed its listing, but this could still be years off. “Too often species languish on the candidate species list and are not afforded the protections of the Endangered Species Act that we know work very well,” said Schroeder. “We urge the incoming administration to expeditiously act to list the species as the scientific research warrants.”

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Red Knot project update -

Lanny McDowell — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:47:57 +0000

Here is a copy of an article I wrote for the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette that was published yesterday. It describes and updates the efforts of Global Conservation Alliance, a partnership of three birders looking for ways to reverse the demise of Red Knots and other shorebirds that depend on horseshoe crab eggs on the shores of Delaware Bay to fuel the last leg of their northern migration. The actual published article is online at http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?19303.

This is the issue I address on the Crusade page of this blog. Please feel free to comment (in Comment field below) and suggest.

UNRAVELING THE RED KNOT DILEMMA by Lanny McDowell for the Vineyard Gazette 11/28/08:

We had committed to spending the last week of May along the New Jersey side of Delaware Bay, on the beaches that stretch north from Cape May. One of my two partners in this project, Porter Turnbull, had set up our first meeting at a service stop far down the Garden State Parkway. Our discussion was with a longtime fisherman who has been an advocate for commercial horseshoe crab harvesters. The meeting outlined the complexities of balancing the interests of crab fishermen, shorebird researchers and the wildlife that served both. The meeting also answered our immediate question: where are the most shorebirds feeding on horseshoe crab eggs at the moment? His answer was Moore’s Beach; and directions were noted.

We went there straightaway, following a crumbling blacktop one-laner through vast marshes, one of us at the wheel, the other out ahead wading through enormous puddles and the tidal streams crossing the roadbed, feeling for deep holes underfoot that would snare our rental. There was only one that deep and, fortunately, Porter found it, much to his surprise and up to his thighs in marsh water.

We emerged from our rite of passage to deadend at an abandoned fishing outpost that remained only as shards of busted-up concrete and useless dock pilings. A tidal estuary flowed into Delaware Bay between the mud banks of the marsh and the pebbled flats near the beach. Shorebirds were flying in from the southeast as singles, in two and threes, and in small flocks. The late light was striking from the west. Off to the south along the sandy bayshore there were laughing gulls wading in tight feeding mobs. The pebbled flats were covered with thousands of birds, all feeding actively and close together: ruddy turnstones, dunlins, some semi-palmated sandpipers, some sanderlings and, most important to us, maybe one third of the east coast population of migrating red knots (Calidris canuta rufa), the reason we were there.

The amazing annual cycle of migration for an adult red knot begins on a tidal mudflat along the coastline of Patagonia. They fly north, typically to the northern shores of Brazil. There they feed intensively, building up fat deposits to burn as fuel as they fly the next long leg over open ocean to the US, where almost all of them make landfall at Delaware Bay, a specific stopover area where fueling up for the last northward leg is top priority. Dispersed over vast areas of the arctic tundra, they will mate, nest and hatch out young, which are precocial and quite capable of feeding themselves in the endless daylight.

Red knots are a large sandpiper about the length of a robin, but bulkier and longer-winged. They are sometimes seen in passage on the Vineyard in small numbers, usually in late summer on flats interior to our south side barrier beaches, while much larger numbers gather at South Beach (off Chatham) and the Monomoy islands, staging for direct return flights to South America. Red knot population declines have researchers puzzled and worried. After tracking the radical drops in shorebird populations over the last thirty years, they fear that extinctions of this and other shorebird species are looming, a real possibility in even the next few years.

The migratory flight segments of red knots run up to twenty-five hundred miles long, non-stop, eighteen thousand miles total in a year. To power this kind of sustained flight at up to forty miles per hour they increase their body weight from fifty to one hundred per cent when sufficient food is available. They even shrink certain digestive organs in the interest of trimming unusable weight. At the end of those flights they are usually emaciated and exhausted … and very hungry.

My interest in these incredible travelers began a few years ago when a friend of mine, an adman and writer on the Vineyard named Geoff Currier, gave me a book he had received as background for an advertising job. It was called Flight of the Red Knot by Brian Harrington (with Charles Flowers), who happens to have long-standing ties with the Vineyard and a career in shorebird research associated with the Monomet Observatory for Conservation Sciences. A couple of years later, another West Tisbury friend, Richard Cohen, suggested that he and I enroll in a shorebird monitoring program in Delaware. We learned how to trap, handle, band, measure and weigh turnstones and knots, as well as how to read and interpret the leg bands of birds caught previously. Then, two years ago in June, I was invited to go up to Lubec, Maine, by Porter Turnbull, who wanted me to meet a biologist friend of his, Norman Famous, his ornithologist mentor from college days. We were all birders. In the course of our stay there the precipitous declines in red knot numbers was discussed, along with the related problems that the horseshoe crab industry was enduring. We wondered if some practical approach which went beyond the research efforts could be applied to the problem. In other words, was there a way to directly stall or reverse the red knot declines; and could part of a solution be to supplement the available food sources at the Delaware Bay stopover? It seemed an elegant solution, if it were actually doable.

Researchers and activists had long been spearheading efforts to mandate the regulation or outright ban of commercial harvesting of horseshoe crabs in and around Delaware Bay, on both the New Jersey and the Delaware sides. The over-fishing of the crabs for bait in conch traps and for medical uses is recognized as a direct contributor to the diminished abundance of eggs on the beaches where the shorebirds need them in great numbers to fuel their flight north in June. Harrington estimates that a red knot will consume 135,000 eggs at this stopover. In addition to the fat requirements for the flight up to the arctic, the birds may arrive to find a snow-covered landscape that is not yet warm enough to produce food for them, so they may have to live off reserves for another two weeks.

An ad hoc committee, the Global Conservation Alliance (GCA), consisting of Famous, Turnbull and McDowell, was formed to save the planet. Well, at the least we would sample the political waters of an issue that had pitted commercial interests against naturalist researchers and bird huggers; and we would look into the possibilities of finding and obtaining a supplementary food provision for the birds. This would involve initiating some activity that would increase the food supply for the birds during a crucial time, provide an interim opportunity for the diminished stocks of breeding-age horseshoe crabs to recover, and find a way to integrate the fishing and naturalist communities in a process that is sustainable and mutually beneficial. We also acknowledged to each other that we would be addressing only one of enumerable factors in a life cycle that literally spans the globe?

Our first discussions within GCA had the nervous self-righteousness of the outsider: Why are all those folks just studying them? When are they going to do something? Don’t we already know they are dying off faster than we can keep count? What if something bad happens in Delaware Bay, like an oil spill? What if there’s a late snow on the breeding grounds? Are they hunted for food in South America? What if they are? At the current rate of loss how many years are left? Does anyone really care, besides us? What if the horseshoe crab fishermen cheat on the harvesting bans? What if the net effect of trapping and processing the birds for research is to stress them beyond recovery?

When Norman joined us in Cape May he had a station wagon stacked with bags of fish-based food product which a subsidiary of Land O’Lakes produces to supply zoos. The Aquamax pelletized feed was the best manufactured food item we could find in terms of size, appearance and nutritional content, the closest to horseshoe crab eggs and what we hoped would appeal to ravenous shorebirds in a feeding frenzy. A grant from the Marine Conservation Action Fund at the New England Aquarium paid for the product. Bottom line, our trials did not have much success getting shorebirds to eat the food, in part because of limits placed on where we were allowed to deploy it and partly because the birds did not readily recognize it as a prey item. The laughing gulls, however, really liked the food we spread on the beaches and would stand shoulder-to-shoulder to devour it until the last morsel was gone.

The week was an unqualified success in other terms: our ability to assess the politics of competing factions, getting the lay of the land, the personal contacts we made and, especially, the resolve we came away with to pursue whatever combination of solutions seems most likely to contribute to slowing the demise of the shorebirds and restoring the egg-laying population of the struggling horseshoe crab, a beast that has been doing what it does for untold millions of years, in the waters of Delaware Bay and in the waters of Martha’s Vineyard.

Where does the GCA partnership go from here, meaning what’s the plan for the spring of 2009? Meetings with fish and wildlife personnel here in Massachusetts are ongoing and we are in touch with an expanding list of allies and interested parties from Virginia to Maine.The current best guess is that three strategies will emerge as the most practical and the most promising: find an available supplemental food that red knots will eat in their natural context; rake the beaches holding the horseshoe crab eggs to turn over the top few inches to expose more eggs to predation by shorebirds; distribute food that will distract competing gulls to locations other than those where the shorebirds are feeding

on horseshoe crab eggs. Any and all of these approaches will require funding, permitting and testing. That’s the plan that is taking shape.

The red knot project administered by Global Conservation Alliance, a non-profit organization, is looking for funding from private and public sources. To read the 2008 project report, updates and contact info, go to the author’s website at LannyMcDowellAvianArt.com; find Blog and then the Crusade page.

Lanny McDowell is an artist and avian photographer making his home in West Tisbury.

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Laughing Gulls scoffing up the Aquamax manufactured food we placed on a test plot:

John Brown, Porter Turnbull and Norm Famous at Moore’s Beach, NJ, plotting to save the planet:

Birds are cool! Lanny

These images and more are available for purchase. Contact me or View store. Holiday Sale!

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