Climate Change and the Case of the Shrinking Red Knots

[jpak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/science/climate-change-bird-red-knots.html

Animal migrations combine staggering endurance and exquisite timing.

Consider the odyssey of a bird known as the red knot. Each spring flocks of the intrepid shorebirds fly up to 9,300 miles from the tropics to the Arctic. As the snow melts, they mate and produce a new generation of chicks. The chicks gorge themselves on insects, and then all the red knots head back south.

“They are there less than two months,” said Jan A. van Gils, an ecologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “It’s a very tight schedule.”

It’s also a vulnerable one. The precipitous decline of the red knots that winter in West Africa may provide a small but telling parable of the perils of climate change.

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I remember the beaches completely covered with red knots during peak migration...

[MH1]

1. Interesting. The US eastern shore migration has been affected by over-harvesting

of horseshoe crab eggs.

That threat has been recognized and steps are being taken to protect the horseshoe crab population and thus the Red Knots.

Add climate change and it's going to be tough.