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  Andy is helping grad student Nate Senner study migrations of Hudsonian Godwits

  

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  He has spent the summer in the tundra and fens of Churchill, Manitoba, near Hudson Bay

  

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  Long-tailed Ducks sit on the many lakes and nest in the tundra.

  

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  A male Willow Ptarmigan's plumage straddles the change of seasons.

  

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  Andy and the other researchers trudge through the fens to work each day.

  

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  They're on the lookout for godwit nests... which can be hard to spot.

  

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  With few places to hide and predators such as Gyrfalcons around, the tundra is a dangerous place.

  

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  Common Ravens are habitual nest predators (here, with a goose egg)

  

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  A Willow Ptarmigan ready for banding (note size of mosquitoes).

  

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  A Whimbrel chick explores a researcher's sleeve.

  

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  A Hudsonian Godwit gets fitted for a data logger.

  

Longtime readers of this blog may remember graduate student Nate Senner’s dispatches as he chased, “twinkled,” and banded Hudsonian Godwits in Chiloé, Chile. This time, we’re turning the blog over to one of his field assistants, who has spent the last two summers on the tundra and fens of Hudson Bay following godwits around. Andy Johnson is a rising sophomore at Cornell, a member of the Cornell Lab’s student World Series of Birding team, and an excellent wildlife photographer. Here’s his account of summer in the Arctic:

For nine weeks this summer, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to return to the western shores of the Hudson Bay to work on Nate Senner’s godwit project. Here I am, living at the convergence of boreal forest, low arctic tundra, and Hudson Bay’s shoreline. I’m surrounded by vast, flat swaths of dry, lichen-encrusted tundra, sedge bogs pockmarked with shallow ponds, and seemingly endless conifer forests. At about 58 degrees North, the region represents some of the southernmost habitat of its kind, making it an accessible place for arctic research.

In this fourth and final field season of Nate’s Ph.D. project, we needed to recapture birds that have been carrying data loggers on their incredible southern sojourns to Chile and Argentina (often flying 6,000 miles without rest, pause or food).  These loggers are tiny light sensors attached to flags on the birds’ legs . They record the times of sunrise and sunset, and then we can calculate the birds’ latitude and longitude for any given day the same way old-time sailors fixed their positions.

Recapturing the birds, however, is no simple task, because what makes this an amazing place to work also makes it a chore: countless birds come here to rear young, and every fiber in their body is devoted to that goal. Their nests are their best-kept secrets, and before we can obtain any information, we need to find them—a task that requires traversing several miles of boggy tundra daily.

Unfortunately for us, this season in Churchill has seen nest predation at a rate far higher than normal. One by one, our hard-earned nests fell to predators—jaegers, foxes, polar bears, and more—until 15 of 16 were empty. As the season wore on we shifted our priorities to tracking the few chicks that had hatched from nests we hadn’t found. We catch the little birds and glue a tiny radio to the back feathers of one bird from each clutch. We can then follow the brood for the next few weeks until the chick’s growing feathers push the radio off. We had more luck on this front this summer than with nests, and were able to follow chicks from eight families.

The chicks’ propensity for long-distance travel is immediately apparent. Within an hour of hatching, the chicks have already left the nests to gorge on whatever insects and invertebrates they stumble across. They must continuously double their weight weekly until they can fly.  Amazingly, we found a chick nearly two miles from its nest less than 36 hours after it had hatched, running on oversized legs, head bobbing between grassy hummocks.

Our days off can be equally exciting. One afternoon along the coastal “highway,” I glanced over my shoulder at the hazy blue Hudson Bay, and saw a large white falcon, sitting aloof, not twenty feet from the road. This adult, white-morph Gyrfalcon is a rare summer visitor to the region, but he hardly seemed like an outsider.  He sat completely unfazed by our slow approach, watching flies buzz by and sizing up potential prey.

One of the most amazing things about spending 60 days in the field in Churchill is the opportunity to intimately observe dozens of species that are only transient visitors any farther south. On days off, I’ve been getting up at 3:00 a.m. to to capture images and audio of many of the breeders at their nests. Sunrises in the fen are truly incomparable: the sun takes several minutes to fully clear the horizon, and then it follows a long and low trajectory until it sets just before 11:00 p.m. One Sunday morning, I watched this tempered dawn bleed across the sky toward the full moon sitting high against a cobalt twilight, and felt a bit estranged from the familiar confines of a passing day.

(Images by Andy Johnson)

Here’s Nate Senner to tell you how the last two stops in the survey of Peru’s coastline went. And we hope you’ll enjoy the slideshow, above, from eBird project leader Marshall Iliff, another member of the survey team. Here’s Nate:

We were expecting great things—spectacular desert scenery and thousands of shorebirds—from our workshops around Lima, and we were not disappointed.  After morning talks and a great lunch at the Universidad Cientifica del Sur, we simply took a short walk to the wetlands of Pantanos de Villa and were met by Franklin’s and Belcher’s Gulls, Elegant Terns, Sanderlings, and Whimbrels. Just what we needed to practice the difficult art of estimating the size of large flocks. Our workshop’s 60 participants finished the day with close looks (through scopes generously loaned by Nikon) at Semipalmated and Least sandpipers—the most complicated identifications of the day.

The next day we put our flock-estimation skills into practice with more than 11,000 shorebirds in nearby Paracas and Ventanilla wetlands. But we were most surprised by Javier Barrio, of the Peruvian conservation-science group Corbidi, and his group’s tally at Bahía de Independencia. They found more than 3,000 calidrid sandpipers (or “peeps”) and 200 Snowy Plovers—at a place that offered only 239 shorebirds (and zero peeps) in the original 1985 survey by Canadians Morrison and Ross. Either the earlier surveyors missed something or things have been changing at Bahía de Independencia, for the better!

We also picked up some uncommon species at these central Peru sites: I had five Wilson’s Phalaropes and four Stilt Sandpipers at Puerto Viejo, Dennis Osorio had a Hudsonian Godwit at the Humedales de Chancay, and Marshall Iliff had a Marbled Godwit at Laguna Paraíso.

Next, we carried our good luck northward to the city of Piura for our last workshop. Northern Peru lacks the severe desert coasts and cold offshore waters of southern Peru. Once you reach La Libertad department, the air gets more humid, actual trees begin to appear, and soon you’re in lush tropics replete with mangrove forests and sweltering heat and humidity.

The birds change in tandem with the climate. Gone, for the most part, are the massive flocks of Franklin’s Gulls, Peruvian Boobies, and Elegant Terns; they’re replaced by Laughing Gulls, Blue-footed Boobies, Royal Terns, and Magnificent Frigatebirds. There’s also the exciting prospect of rare species wandering down from the tropics: In the past few years more than a few first Peruvian records have come from exploring areas such as the Virrila estuary and Tumbes mangroves. At least a couple of the birders among us were hoping for just such a sighting during our time in those areas…

In many ways, this final workshop, in the small town of Vice, was our best.  The turnout included an excellent 35 students and enthusiasts who came from as far as eight hours away. The alcalde (mayor) of Vice gave us a personal welcome. An oil company plans to construct a pipeline and port in the nearby mangroves of San Pedro de Vice, and the alcalde said he hoped the interest inspired by our work might help to forestall the development plans.

In the next day’s censuses, the shorebirds once again did not disappoint. Brad Andres, whose groups were covering San Pedro and the nearby Virilla estuary, found some of the highest counts from anywhere along the Peruvian coast, including a whopping 1,100 Whimbrel, 500 Black-bellied Plover, 600 Willets, and 53 Marbled Godwits.  Hopefully numbers like those can lend some credence to the arguments being put forth by Vice’s alcalde and a handful of local conservation groups.

Elsewhere, we saw fewer birds but arguably had more fun. Fernando and I needed to survey some small wetland units to the north, in an area that is Peru’s equivalent of the beaches around Miami—hip, hot, and crowded with people. The scene’s epicenter is a resort town called Mancora, and it happens to have a number of lagoons that Fernando and I needed to survey.

Knowing full well how crowded the beaches would get, we set out early. Our day started well: We surveyed all three of our lagoons and our beach transect well before any beachgoers had arrived. But during our return to the main highway we began encountering more and more sunbathers and frolickers. Worse, we realized we could no longer drive back out the way we had come in—we were going to have to keep driving south looking for another exit from the beach.

Soon we were on Mancora’s main beaches, with thousands of people swarming around us, all wondering why two dirty guys were driving a pickup truck across their beach!  All that I could imagine was that somehow we would get stuck and no one would help us get out. Apparently Fernando was more concerned that we would run over a small child chasing after a soccer ball.  Either way, we knew we were somewhere we shouldn’t be!

Thankfully, in the end we made it out, sans injury and with only moderate embarrassment. And how many shorebirds did we count for our trouble? A measly seven species and twenty-seven individuals!

The next day saw the end of our surveys and the conclusion of one of the most successful field projects I have ever been a part of. We surveyed the entire Peruvian coast for the first time in 25 years and involved nearly 150 participants from all over Peru (more detailed survey results are here). We hope that energy and interest will carry on and encourage more Peruvians to help safeguard their coastline and its inhabitants. It will be exciting to see what the next few years will bring.

(Images by Marshall Iliff. Thanks to Fernando Angulo, Brad Andres, Luis Alza, Nataly Aranzamendi, Javier Barrio, Stephen Gast, Marshall Iliff, Richard Johnston, Daniel Lane, Alex More, Daniel Osorio, Thomas Valqui, and all of the other participants!  And many thanks to Nikon for providing great telescopes.)

Last time we heard from Nate Senner, he was herding godwits in Chile. Since then he’s been to Peru for a three-week stint of shorebird-identification workshops with an incredible goal: to survey the entire coastline of the country. Here’s Nate with his first installment of how things went:

Twenty-five years ago, two Canadian biologists undertook a massive task: they surveyed the entire coast of South America for shorebirds via small airplane.  The publication that emerged is a landmark in our knowledge of South American shorebirds.  Unfortunately, for many areas including Peru, it’s also our only knowledge.

This February, with the help of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, BirdLife International Peru, Nikon, Calidris, and the Centro de Ornitologia y Biodiversidad (Corbidi), a team from the Cornell Lab traveled the entire coast of Peru, teaching three workshops on shorebird surveying and visiting 37 potentially important shorebird sites.

The basic format is this: In the cities of Mollendo, Lima, and Piura we spent a morning covering shorebird identification, survey methodology, and conservation. Then, in the afternoon, we visited a local beach to practice what we learned. The next morning we split into teams of five and headed out into the field for real censuses. Afterward, all the data go online in the brand-new eBird Peru portal.

So how did the first workshop go? Great. Twenty-five college students and eight staff from the Santuario Nacional de Las Lagunas de Mejia, near Mollendo, packed the classroom for the morning’s lessons.

The undeniable fun of listening to presentations aside, the highlight of the day had to be our field trip to Mejia, one of South America’s largest and most important coastal wetlands. It didn’t disappoint. Most exciting for me was finding four Hudsonian Godwits, quite a rare bird in Peru. We were also graced with passing flocks of Semipalmated Sandpipers, Greater and Lesser yellowlegs, and two very southerly Western Sandpipers. We also helped document the first-ever Peru record of White-winged Coot, a visitor from southern Chile.

The only problem for the day occurred when we the bus wouldn’t start for our return journey to Arequipa. Hailing a public bus seemed to be our only option, so all 35 of us piled onto two buses to be serenaded by blaring criollo music for the three hours back to Arequipa.

Needless to say, the next morning dawned a little too early, but we dispersed to our six sites nonetheless.  My group headed five hours to the south, nearly to the Chilean border, to a site called Boca del Rio. By far the biggest excitement of the day came from the group covering the Lagunas de Ite. They found another five Hudsonian Godwits, plus the first record for Moquegua department of Marbled Godwit. Other groups found Stilt and Pectoral sandpipers and Whimbrels and Ruddy Turstones in the hundreds.

After a much-needed day of rest, it was on to workshop 2 in the capital city of Lima. Stay tuned for an update on what we saw there—and a few shorebird photos, too.

(Image courtesy Nate Senner. Thanks to Fernando Angulo, Brad Andres, Luis Alza, Nataly Aranzamendi, Javier Barrio, Stephen Gast, Marshall Iliff, Richard Johnston, Daniel Lane, Alex More, Daniel Osorio, Thomas Valqui, and all of the other participants!  And many thanks to Nikon for providing great telescopes.)

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 was changing on January 15. Up till then, the number of godwits around seemed normal, if a bit unusually distributed around the island. For instance, Putemun, a large bay that in previous years held 2,000-3,000 godwits, had 800 this year. But Ten-Ten, which normally hosts around 200 godwits, had more than 2,000 this year. Totaling across all sites, all of the birds we expected seemed accounted for, so we were not particularly worried.

But last Friday our team went to Pullao, where we had been seeing around 4,000 godwits. On that day there were only 2,500 godwits. Then, as we waited for high tide so we could watch the birds go to their roosting sites (where they are easiest to catch), they started to leave the site entirely.

This had never happened before and so we all sat there wondering if it was something we had done. The next day, just to make sure it wasn’t our fault, we timed our return to Pullao right at the peak of high tide, when all of the birds should already have been roosting. But there were only 700 birds around.

As the tide began to fall again we moved to a nearby site, Putemun, thinking maybe the missing birds had gone there. Not only were Pullao’s birds not there, but fewer than a quarter of Putemun’s own birds remained. Where had all of the godwits gone?

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery, I spent the next two days visiting as many sites near Pullao and Putemun as I could. The rest of the team has been catching the other species that we are interested in, Whimbrels, while I have been out sleuthing.

They’ve been lucky, but I haven’t. Two days ago I found about 500 godwits total at three sites—not nearly enough to match the several thousand missing birds. Yesterday I went to Aucar, Dalcahue, and then Pullao again, turning up a measly 75 godwits…. Where have all of the godwits gone?

Now the search is on and today the entire crew will spread out and visit every nook and cranny in the central part of Isla Chiloé to see if we can find our birds. We certainly don’t think that they are dead, but beyond that we have not ruled out any possibilities: Have they moved to a different part of Chiloé? Are they roosting on a secluded beach and returning to feed at their normal sites when we are not there?  Or have they left the island entirely? I don’t know, but I hope that we find out soon or else we are going to be out of luck on this expedition!

(Image: Godwit footprints on Chiloé Island, courtesy Nathan Senner)

In his first few days back in Chile, Nate lost no time in reconnecting. Here’s Nate:

Old friends

Hello again! I’m back on Chiloé Island (see a map) to spend another month trekking around after Hudsonian Godwits. Last year’s expedition, with my colleague Jim Johnson (from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), was a big success. We captured some 250 godwits and 100 Whimbrels, and resighting those birds will give us valuable information on how well those birds survive their arduous yearly migrations.

For the last week Jim and I have spent 10 hours a day staring at the legs of shorebirds, and it’s been well worth it! By reading the birds’ leg bands we know exactly which birds have survived their latest migration, and we also learn which sites on the island are important for godwits—and therefore for conservation.

We’ve already resighted nearly 300 of the 600 godwits we’ve banded in past years here on Chiloé—and we’re hoping to get to 400. But what’s even more exciting has been finding five of the godwits that I banded just this past summer in Susitna Flats, Alaska (map).

It seems so remarkable to me that I journey for over 30 hours on planes and in cars to get here, only to find these same birds that I tromped around with for a whole summer. I last saw them on the complete other side of the globe, and now they’re here, casually feeding on clams and worms as if it were the most normal thing in the world to see me again. I can only hope that we will be able to catch one of them; it would sort of be like meeting up again with an old friend!

We will find out soon enough, though, whether we’ll have any luck capturing godwits. (We’ve set ourselves a goal of 300 godwits and 150 Whimbrels this year, to expand our study.) I’ll be sending updates about our work to this blog, so stay tuned!

(Images by Thomas B. Johnson. See more of his photos at his flickr page.)