I guess it was about time to point out, as Gene did, that long flights (or
"overflights") are characteristic of shorebirds, with the Red Knot as a
good example. That species may be one of the best examples, actually, as
its places of concentration are few and far between. It's not so well
realized that Short-billed Dowitchers are just about as concentrated as
knots, if you look at maximum counts up and down the coast of the NW. What
we don't know is whether common birds such as Black-bellied Plovers, for
example, make flights of similar length as those of the knots, with birds
wintering in a given bay having flown a thousand or more miles directly to
get there. Or do they move from estuary to estuary up and down the coast?
They've radio-tagged a lot of shorebirds in Europe and are getting some
feeling for their local movements, and there are lots of recoveries of
banded birds that indicate long-distance flights, also some of the latter
from our Atlantic coast, but we are at the very beginning of finding out
about such things on the American Pacific coast.

By the way, it's very likely that our Grays Harbor knots are on their way
to Wrangel Island, off the north coast of Siberia, to breed near the Skagit
Flats Snow Geese. The knots, dowitchers, and many other shorebirds
presumably fly directly from this area to the Copper River delta in
southern Alaska, then from there to their arctic or subarctic breeding
grounds. These long migrations are made possible because they feed and feed
and feed, depositing fat until they become veritable butterballs, then use
the energy metabolized from those fat deposits to sustain them during their
lengthy flights. What a way to lose weight--go on a thousand-mile flight!

Dennis Paulson