Tweets:

Several of you spied me and Clarice last weekend working mist nets on
Bottle Beach. For your info we were helping on a volunteer basis with a
western sandpiper tracking project, through Nisqually Refuge, (and Point
Reyes Bird Observatory and USGS). The lady (Jill) who is leading the
local field work is from USGS in San Fransisco.

The project web site overview is :
http://66.241.214.202/Tracking/wesa_tracking.cfm#info

The project, in a lage part, amounts to placing radio transmitters on
WESAs in Mexico and California, and then tracking them to Alaska. This
has gone on for a few years, and several people are running receivers in
Grays Harbor right now.

A fairly new part of the project involves taking tiny blood samples from
some sandpipers, and to sample invertebrates, at major stopping points
(like Bottle Beach) to quantify how valuable each spot is for the birds to
"recharge" during migration. Its fine to state that Gray's Harbor is
essential for shorebird migration because it gets so many birds; however
this project is trying to gather some hard data. That (and banding and
measuring) is what we were doing at the site last weekend when you
were scoping the red knots and the merlin.

I want to comment about what an experience this has been. Like most
birders, I have watched shorebirds from a relatively great distance. We
always avoided walking on the flats, to not disturb the birds. This
project, of course, required close encounters, and I was very surprised to
see how quickly the birds went about their business of foraging all
around our feet, as long as we held reasonably still. Especially in the
very early dawn, just as the sun first broke through the trees to the
northeast, there were immense flocks of WESAs and short billed
dowitchers (along with leasts and dunlins and plovers and quite a few
others) that rolled onto that beach from the south and from across the
bay. There are good things to eat around the old pilings that extend out
from the shore and the presence of a couple of people are not going to
stand in the way of serious consumption. It becomes a bizarre and
musical dance of sandpipers scurrying like ants, all peeping and probing
and flowing across the sandy mud. Their colors are really quite stylish in
morning light. It can quickly make one a convert to the shorebird club.




Jerry Broadus, PLS
Geometrix Surveying, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Puyallup, WA. 98371