A New Season

Welcome back to our arctic shorebird blog!  It's been another busy winter for everyone at Manomet, analyzing the results from last year's field season, fundraising for our upcoming projects, and making plans for another season working on arctic shorebirds!  As spring begins to show itself in Massachusetts, our thoughts go north with the returning birds, who have cleverly "overwintered" in the southern hemisphere summer, and are now on their way to their arctic breeding grounds.  Every time we plan the extensive logistics necessary to transport a crew of 13 people and sustain them in the arctic for a month, I marvel at the birds who make the trip with no luggage and only their instincts to guide them.  We will be spending much of the next month getting ready for the first of our two projects this summer, while the birds are already on their way north.  

By the time we arrive at Teshekpuk Lake on June 7th, the shorebirds will already be starting to nest.  We'll be returning to the same region of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska to study both the abundance of shorebirds in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, and also to test nesting birds for Avian Influenza.  We will have a slightly larger crew this spring, so that we can visit more plots scattered around the landscape than last year.  This helps us make a more precise estimate of the total number of birds using the area.

Later on in the summer, we'll return to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to complete our project there, which will provide the first estimates of the numbers of birds using each river delta along the entire coastline.  This year we'll be completing both the full coastal survey, and also establishing three fixed camps where we can track the changes in abundance of birds through the staging season.  We have found that birds move among the many different sites, and that their numbers vary enormously as the season progresses, so the fixed camps will give us a better measure of the abundances through the season.

We'll be updating this site weekly throughout the spring and summer field projects, so check back for both text and podcast updates, and thanks for your interest in and support of our work!