Here’s part two of Jon Erickson’s report from his holiday visit to Round Island, 14 miles off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean: Evenings on Round Island are quite special. The island is home to a large colony of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters that dig burrows into the loose soil to lay their eggs. After the sun goes [...]
Over the holidays, recordist Jon Erickson spent a couple of weeks on Round Island, a slanting, sun-baked slab of rock about 14 miles off the north coast of Mauritius. He recorded the island’s multitudes of Herald Petrels and Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, helped the island wardens with chores, and shared his meals with several stout lizards. Here’s [...]
Cornell graduate student Nate Senner has been writing from Chiloé Island, Chile, where he’s studying Hudsonian Godwits on their wintering grounds. He wrote yesterday with a puzzling situation on his hands: Where have all the godwits gone? A funny thing began to happen five days ago—the godwits began to disappear. We first noticed that something [...]
Cornell Ph.D. student Nathan Senner is back on Chiloé Island, Chile, this month to study shorebirds he last saw in his home state of Alaska. As you may remember from stories he posted last year, he’s trying to learn how Hudsonian Godwits and Whimbrels survive their 8,000-mile migrations from the top of the world to [...]
How do you say Bar-tailed Godwit in Maori? That’s one of the first things you’ll learn in our cover story from Living Bird Autumn 2009—now free to read online. Don Stap’s article starts on a New Zealand mudflat and follows these graceful, 13-ounce shorebirds to the Arctic on the longest nonstop migration in the bird [...]
