April 2011

Hello friends! What has happened to the weather this winter? I think I want to become a snowbird and travel farther south instead of staying here. But right now my snowbird friends are heading back here from Central and South America. They were lucky and missed out on all the cold weather! I am hanging out at the beach, trying to warm up. It looks like a bird Spring Break right now with all of the birds here. Most of these feathered friends are collectively called shorebirds, or waders of the shores, wetlands, and grasslands. These birds share common characteristics of long bills, legs, and toes, and drab color and include sandpipers, plovers, oystercatchers, avocets, and stilts. The longer legged birds walk out into deeper waters and the longer the bills, the deeper they probe in the sand, mud or water looking for food.

Most shorebirds build their nests on the ground. Therefore, their colors camouflage with the earth tone colors - dull reds, browns, blacks, whites and grays. 

They undertake some of the longest migration trips of birds. The Godwit flies nonstop thousands of mile from Alaska to South America without resting, eating, or drinking water!  They walk around mudflats and wetlands, probing in the mud or water looking for invertebrates, like insects and mollusks. The Red Knot flies from the Canadian Arctic Circle to the southern part of South America, but they do stop along the way. You can see them in Alabama during migration! Heading north, these birds stop along the shores in Delaware, where they feed on horseshoe crab eggs. These birds are in trouble because many of these crabs have been harvested for fish bait; thus the birds have less food and many do not make it back to the breeding grounds.  Fortunately, this harvesting has been stopped.

Some of these birds have interesting stories.  We see these two birds at Dauphin Islands and along the Alabama coastline, too! The US Fish and Wildlife Service has been monitoring, or watching, these birds. They band them with multiple, colored plastic bands.  Then, when people like you and me see them and report the colors and order of the colors in a band, scientists can tell where these birds have been and why their numbers are decreasing. Many of these birds are threatened or endangered because their habitats are disappearing, not just in the breeding grounds, but all along the migration routes, from Canada and the US to South America.  A habitat is the kind of plants and other surroundings where they live, just like your home is your habitat.  Several of these species, such as plovers and oystercatchers, breed in Alabama along the coastline. Ornithologists, people who study birds, are monitoring the shorebirds that breed in Alabama. These birds are feeding along the shore where oil from last summer’s oil spill is still found in the beach sands.   Others feed on the marine life that has been harmed by the oil on the ocean floor.

 The United States Fish and Wildlife Services has a Shorebird Sisters Schools Program with lessons for your teacher at http://www.fws.gov/sssp/index.html. You can even find a classroom in another part of the world to e-mail or write letters to share information about shorebirds.

My bird friends at the Alabama Ornithological Society will have a shorebird workshop at their spring meeting in April. You don’t want to miss this chance to learn about these very beautiful and interesting birds. UH-OH! Gotta go! A raptor’s coming! See ya’ next tiiiiiiiiiiiiiimmee….