Bird’s-eye-view reveals priority habitat for threatened shorebirds

As the national lead biologist for the recovery of the threatened red knot, and the Service’s state lead (N.J.) for threatened piping plover, Wendy Walsh thinks a lot about managing the impact people can have on the habitat these species depend upon: sandy beaches and tidal inlets.

A new inventory of modifications to beach and tidal inlet habitat from Maine to Virginia has given Wendy Walsh — the Service’s lead biologist for the recovery of the threatened red knot — new perspective on habitat availability for shorebirds. Credit: FWS

During Hurricane Sandy, barrier beaches overwashed around Little Egg Inlet, an opening into Great Bay in the wilderness portion of  Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. And that turned out to be a good thing for plover. “It created great habitat,” Walsh said. “Plover numbers really increased.”

Did they ever.

Today, Walsh said, “Beaches around Little Egg Inlet provide habitat for about a third of the plover population in New Jersey, as well as habitat for concentrations of migrating red knots, and for the threatened plant seabeach amaranth.”

But now proposed activities in and around the inlet threaten to interfere with the natural processes that are necessary to maintain this habitat complex. “There has been drift of sand from nearby beach fill, and a plan to dredge the inlet,” Walsh explained.  It’s not yet clear how these activities may affect the habitat.

In the face of these threats, an inventory of beach and tidal inlet habitat compiled by coastal geologist Tracy Rice has provided valuable perspective to help make the case for careful management around this inlet. Although Little Egg Inlet was previously considered important plover habitat in New Jersey, the inventory revealed something new:

“Little Egg Inlet is one of only two unmodified inlets between Montauk, N.Y., and Chincoteague, Va., a shoreline distance of nearly 350 miles,” said Walsh. “That means that nearly all other inlets along that entire stretch of coastline have been stabilized, dredged, sand mined, or altered in some way.”

Developed using imagery from states, private organizations, and Google Earth, the habitat inventory revealed that Little Egg Inlet in New Jersey is one of just two unmodified tidal inlets in a 350-mile stretch of coastline within the breeding range of piping plover and red knot. Credit: Google Earth

It seems Little Egg Inlet is an even rarer natural asset than anybody realized, and that’s important to know given the Service’s emphasis on prioritizing habitats that are considered to be of high value to at-risk species.

All three of Forsythe’s listed beach-dependent species thrive in the shifting habitats that surround the natural inlet. “We knew these species favor these kinds of inlet sites, and we knew most of them were altered, but we didn’t know it was all but two,” said Walsh. “The data provided a landscape perspective that enabled us to say Little Egg Inlet is unique, at least in the Mid-Atlantic,” she said.

“It just took someone adding it all up.”

That someone was Rice, with support from the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC). Before she could even begin tallying all of the beach armoring structures (seawalls, revetments, giant sandbags) and inlet modifications (structures, dredging, mining for fill, opened artificially, closed artificially, or relocated) in the region, she had to find all of the things she needed to count.

Rice described the process as similar to assembling a puzzle with scattered pieces. She began by reviewing the literature, including maps dating to the 17th century, for any and all pre-existing data, then completed the picture with imagery from Google Earth, Google Maps, state agencies, municipalities, and private organizations.

The completed inventory provides a comprehensive look at the location, status, and condition of potential piping plover breeding grounds from Maine to Virginia in three periods: before Hurricane Sandy, immediately after Hurricane Sandy, and three years after post-storm recovery efforts.

The inventory encompasses a suite of products — including habitat assessment reports, Google Earth data layers, Microsoft Excel databases, and Data Basin shapefiles — that are available for anyone to download on the North Atlantic LCC’s Beach and Tidal Habitat Inventories product page.

The products dovetail with Rice’s previous work to inventory coastal habitat in the Southeastern portion of the U.S. Collectively, these resources provide a comprehensive view of the red knot’s coastal habitat, and Walsh is already considering using the information in an upcoming project to develop a recovery plan for red knot.

“The recovery outline will give us perspective to think about future habitat availability, how much of that is managed, and how much is undisturbed,” she said.

NJ biologist recognized for efforts to save endangered wildlife

Biologist Wendy Walsh (holding a red knot here) of our New Jersey Field Office is receiving the Women and Wildlife Leadership Award from one of our partner organizations. She was recognized by our director earlier this year as an endangered species recovery champion too! Photo courtesy of Wendy.

One of our very own biologists, Wendy Walsh, will be among the three individuals honored tonight by the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey at the 11th annual Women & Wildlife Awards.

The awards recognize the recipients’ achievements, the advances they have made for women in their professions, their efforts to increase awareness of rare species and the habitats they depend on, and their contributions to New Jersey’s wildlife.

Mara Cige of CWF writes: As a senior fish and wildlife biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2016 Women & Wildlife Leadership Award Winner Wendy Walsh has proven herself invaluable in the endangered species field for her work with wildlife such as the piping plover, swamp pink, and seabeach amaranth.

Her most notable work is with the red knot. Ms. Walsh took the species lead in the middle of the federal listing process. Her tireless efforts coordinating, analyzing and interpreting data, particularly detailing the effects of changing climate on these long-distance migrant shorebirds has made her work widely acclaimed as the final rule.

From biology to policy, she has an uncanny ability to grasp important information and translate it for any species she finds herself working with. She has created partnerships with additional organizations to accelerate conservation efforts. In such collaborations, Ms. Walsh’s open-mindedness to others’ expertise makes for effective planning and implementation of the vision she has to one day recover all threatened and endangered species.

By acknowledging these special individuals, we hope to encourage more young women to strive to make a positive impact on species and habitat protection, especially through the biological sciences.

Check out this Q&A between Mara and Wendy.

What is your favorite thing about your job?
“I love that I’m constantly learning something new. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to learn about and observe so many species, and I’ve had the chance to really get to know a few in particular — piping plovers, seabeach amaranth, bog turtles, swamp pink, and red knots. And I’ve had the opportunity to work on such a wide range of issues — utility lines, transportation, mitigation, stormwater, beach nourishment, bird collision, volunteer programs, restoration, fishery management, listing, and most recently aquaculture. I’m very fortunate to have a job where there is always a new learning opportunity on the horizon.”

Do you have a New Jersey wildlife species that you like best? Why?
“From a non-scientific point of view, I love watching dragonflies and wading birds with my kids, and taking the family to count and tag horseshoe crabs. But professionally, I’m partial to the beach species I’ve worked on — piping plovers, red knots, seabeach amaranth. I enjoy the beach ecosystem, and I feel a responsibility to these beach-dependent species that face so many challenges along New Jersey’s human-dominated coast.”

What interests you the most about New Jersey’s wildlife?
“I’m fascinated at the contrast between New Jersey’s really remarkable habitats and ecosystems in the context of our equally remarkable human population density. Generations of pioneering conservationists from past decades have allowed our State’s wildlife to persist even with so many people. I view our generation — and my kids’ — as stewards of that conservation legacy.”

What is your favorite thing to do when you aren’t working?
“I love spending time with my family, such as taking trips with my husband, Mac, and two daughters, as well as time with extended family — Mom, brothers, cousins. I enjoy working with my kids’ Girls Scout troops and helping at their schools.”

Join us in congratulating Wendy!

Red knots battle climate change—on both ends of the Earth

Today we’re sharing a story from Audubon Magazine written by Deborah Cramer, author of The Narrow Edge: A tiny bird, an ancient crab, and an epic journey. The tiny, threatened red knot is an omen for how devastating ocean acidification can be.

The vast, unbroken beach at Bahía Lomas stretches for about 30 miles along the Strait of Magellan in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern end of South America. I’ve stood for hours hoping to see shorebirds in this remote, inhospitable place, where the wind blows at hurricane strength, the trees are forced into a permanent lean, and the ebbing tide disappears beyond the horizon, about four miles away. When it returns, rushing in over the wide mudflat, shorebirds follow, thousands of them, appearing first as puffs of smoke in the distance, then in large flocks, rising and falling in smooth, sinuous curves. They alight on the mud, and I am surrounded by birds.

They are mostly Red Knots, sandpipers that have come to winter on this vast beach. Slightly larger than robins, Red Knots travel some 19,000 miles every year, sometimes flying for six or eight days at a stretch without stopping to rest or feed. Their marathon journey, from one end of the Earth to the other and back again, distinguishes the Red Knot as one of the avian kingdom’s most accomplished fliers. Ornithologists have long recognized the knot as sublime. Alexander Sprunt Jr., preeminent South Carolina ornithologist, writer, ardent conservationist, and, from 1935 to 1973, supervisor of the National Audubon Society’s southern sanctuaries, saw more than his share of charismatic birds, including colorful Carolina Parakeets and fabled Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. To Sprunt and his colleague E. Burnham Chamberlain, writing in the 1949 edition of South Carolina Bird Life, the small, less conspicuous knot nonetheless held a special place, representing “an untrammeled wildness and freedom that is equaled by few and surpassed by none.”

Red knots at Mispillion Harbor, Delaware. Delaware Bay hosts the largest concentration of the rufa red knot subspecies during the spring, when knots on their marathon migrations stop to refuel and take advantage of the largest gathering of horseshoe crabs in the world. Credit: Gregory Breese/USFWS

Curious about how such small birds can manage such extraordinary journeys, I followed them—from the treacherous shoals along the Magellan Strait, to a crowded resort in Argentina, up along the East Coast of the United States, into the icy Arctic, and then back, along the muddy shores of James Bay, through the dense fog of Quebec’s Mingan Islands, and then into the bay behind my home in Massachusetts. I found them there one autumn day—young birds that a couple of months earlier had walked half a mile, perhaps a mile, from their nests to the sea, and then, inconceivably, begun their first long migration, along a route they’d never traveled, to a destination they’d never seen. The story—of their tenacity and the tenacity of the hundreds of people I met along the way dedicated to providing the birds safe passage—became my 2015 book, The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey.

Just as the book was going to press, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the rufa Red Knot as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the first U.S. bird listed explicitly because its existence is imperiled by global warming. The knot they describe, Calidris canutus rufa, is one of six subspecies of Red Knots worldwide, distinguished by its Eastern Seaboard migration. Since 2000 the rufa Red Knot’s population has declined by roughly 75 percent at key stopovers. Threats to the bird, according to the USFWS, are likely to put the rufa Red Knot “in danger of extinction in the next few decades.”

One might think a bird that each year flies the length of the globe and back—a bird that finds sustenance and shelter in places as widespread and diverse as the Jersey Shore, the Arctic Circle, and the Magellan Strait—might be immune to the warming planet; might, if one of its homes or stopovers becomes unsuitable, simply find another. It’s more complicated than that.

In 2014 the National Audubon Society’s science team published the results of a seven-year study showing how global warming might affect North America’s bird species in the coming decades. The Audubon Birds and Climate Change Report showed that of 588 North American bird species considered, 314 of them could lose more than half their range by 2080. That means that for these birds, the area with the climate conditions they need to survive will shrink or shift so dramatically that they’ll be left with less (often far less) than half of the suitable range that exists today. It’s an alarming prediction, particularly when there’s no guarantee the birds will find new habitat elsewhere.

A red knot parent and chicks near Hudson Bay (northeastern Canada). The females generally depart a few days after the eggs hatch, leaving the males to tend the young until they’re old enough to fly. Fortunately, baby Red Knots—as is true with most other sandpipers—can forage for themselves as soon as their down is dry and they can walk, which happens within a few hours of hatching. Credit: Brad Winn, from Audubon website

Shorebirds spend their lives at the delicate places where sea meets land—one of the front lines of climate change—and are therefore particularly vulnerable. In 2014 scientists led by Michael Reed from Tufts University and Hector Galbraith, then at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, reported that global warming exacerbates the risk of extinction for nearly 90 percent of North American shorebirds. The team evaluated threats the birds may face in a warming world, including a shrinking tundra; rising seas; ocean acidification; increasingly stormy weather; and dependence on specialized environments, such as Delaware Bay. In their analysis, even at its lowest sensitivity, 20 populations of North American shorebirds, including the Red Knot, would fall into the U.S. Shorebird Conservation Plan’s highest-risk category—“highly imperiled.” As their world heats up, Red Knots are threatened almost everywhere along their flyway: The warming, acidic sea inhibits the growth of the shellfish the birds need to fuel their impressive migration; rising seas may flood their seaside homes; rising temperatures threaten to shrink their Arctic nesting grounds and expose them to more predators. No matter where they go, no matter how many new homes they might seek, Red Knots can’t escape the effects of global warming.

To power their long migrations, these tiny birds require phenomenal quantities of energy-rich food. Along the route, they gorge on tiny mussels and clams, horseshoe crab eggs, and sea worms, packing in energy for the flights ahead, burning it off on the wing, and then refueling again at the next stop. In Delaware Bay they nearly double their weight—a metabolic feat that would likely make any human attempting it seriously ill but that crowns knots as powerhouse long-distance fliers and one of the animal kingdom’s most rapid and efficient energy consumers. Ocean acidification, a largely invisible consequence of global warming, may soon compromise the quality of Red Knots’ food, if it hasn’t already.

Tagging red knots on Cape Cod. The yellow tag is a geo-locator; the lime green alphanumeric flag means it was banded in the U.S. Credit: USFWS

As carbon dioxide emissions rise, the pH of seawater drops, and it becomes less saturated with aragonite, a mineral clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops require for building strong shells. In increasingly acidic seawater, these animals’ shells are smaller, thinner, and weaker, and their larvae grow more slowly, with fewer surviving to settle on the sea bottom. Mussels are unable to cling to their homes on rocky tidal flats. In a 2012 symposium, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research concluded with “high confidence” that mollusks are “one of the groups most sensitive to ocean acidification.” Ocean acidity is increasing rapidly—more than 10 times faster than at any time in the past 55 million years, and possibly at a rate unprecedented in the past 300 million years. Red Knots weren’t around then; they don’t benefit from an evolutionary history of adapting to such rapid changes in ocean chemistry and the problems it brings to the shellfish that, in most places along the flyway, are their primary source of food.

Finish reading Deborah’s story on Audubon’s website.