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A recovery as slow as a horseshoe crab on a cold day

We begin our Delaware Bay Shorebird Project on both sides of the bay this week and as always, it’s a time to look at our program and see where we are and ask the question where would we like to go? 

The most recent horseshoe crabs surveys suggest there has been no improvement in horseshoe crab numbers since the ASMFC began its regulations affecting the harvest of crabs in 1998.  Moreover the survival models developed for horseshoe crab and red knots developed by a team of scientists, including me, suggest a recovery period of decades.  In the meantime red knots, one of many shorebird species that rely on the horseshoe crab’s eggs, are fast heading towards extinction and the listing of the knot is imminent.  Other species. like the ruddy turnstone, will almost certainly follow as well as some of the 60% of shorebird species now in decline.  These birds cannot wait for an anemic approach to restoration.

Ironically if you ask the ASMFC management board if more can be done, they will say no. They argue that the harvest is effectively closed now.  That don’t include the half million crabs killed by fishermen in DE, MD and VA .  These animals , they will explain,  are either excess males, and thus unnecessary to population, or outside the Delaware Bay population.  They will also point out a recovery is underway, not recognizing the threat to all shorebirds of a recovery that many take several human generations to accomplish.  Getting serious action from this agency that has had a hand in the decimation of the bay’s Atlantic Sturgeon, River Herring, Weakfish would be a herculean task.

Can nothing more be done?

We could close all harvests, making it illegal to hold a horseshoe crab at all, and not reopen it until a recovery is underway.  This is what NJ did for crabs, and the ASMFC did for striped bass.   Why not do it for the crabs throughout the range?  The incentives would be properly aligned in this way,  use depends on restoration.  Now  there really is no financial incentive to restore crab populations.. 

Notwithstanding the logic, strong action of this kind is unlikely when the people making money from crabs benefit from inaction and the people who care for shorebirds have no substantive voice ( or choose to not speak loudly). 

Given this, there are four actions that can make more crabs or more eggs available to birds now. 

1. Stop all major sources of illegal use.   Are trawlers taking crabs in international waters and using them as bait without landing them thus avoiding accountability?   Are crabs being taking illegally and landed secretly?  Are fishermen underreporting or reporting their take as males, when they are really more valuable females.  We need a smart investigation into the killing of horseshoe crabs other than the reported harvests and act to stop it.

2. Expose to the light of day the secretive bleeding operations of companies extracting lysate from horseshoe crabs and insure mortality of no greater than 5%.  Currently the bleeding of crabs is cloaked in secrecy and peer reviewed estimates of mortality are far higher than industry reports.  There needs to be a baywide effort to make the bleeding of crabs an above board enterprise and force the drug companies, who earn in excess of of $200,000,000 from the blood of crabs,  to take part in restoration.

3. Improve marginal breeding habitats on the bay by creating wave attenuating oyster reefs and introducing new sand to depleted beaches.  Currently more than half of the suitable breeding habitat in the Delaware Bay is marginal for horseshoe crab breeding.  We need to quickly increase the area, but also make it easier for crabs to lay eggs unaffected by wind driven waves.  We call these wave-protected areas mini-Mispillion harbors,  a jetty-protected Delaware Beach where crabs lay eggs in enormous quantities.

4. Mobilize the public into a massive crab rescue project.  Ever year thousands of crabs overturn from heavy surf , many failing to right themselves and dying from desiccation or attack from gulls.   Other crabs die after being impinged in breakwaters, bulkheads and other water structures.   We need to gear up programs like Glen Gauvry’s Flip a Crab program to rescue all crabs that can be rescued.

5.  Expand Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences nascent social marketing program so that the public can take part in the actions like those listed above and begin the process of overcoming lethargic regulatory agencies.

These five efforts would give shorebirds and crabs a new start by changing prospects right away, instead of waiting for a recovery that could take generations to achieve. 

unraveling the texas knot

Fish killed from a red tide event on Padres Island TX. photo by Barbara KeelerAs David Newstead and I started our week of fieldwork on Padre Island National Seashore, we were hoping for better conditions than the catastrophic fish kill that blanketed Texas beaches last fall. There to trap shorebirds, we mostly spent our time riding the 60 mile long undeveloped beach near Corpus Christi, TX, documenting one of the worse red tide events every to occur on the Gulf Coast. The deadly toxin from the algae bloom, killed fish and birds particularly red knots. At the beginning of our trip, last year we saw a few hundred red knots, by the end of our trip we found only dead or zombielike birds debilitated by the lack of food and toxins. We thought the plague had decimated the population.

It did not. In fact, our estimate of the population grew over this winter.   The story of that increase is one that would warm the heart of any biologist that holds on to the ideal that proper studies are the foundation of all good conservation.

When David Newstead, Humphrey Sitters and I started our project, we knew little of the red knots in Texas. In our 2008 assessment of status ( Studies of Avian Biology Monograph no 36), we estimated only a few hundred knots using the Gulf Coast of Texas. At the time, we thought most were passing through Texas either to or from unknown wintering areas in South America. We knew nothing of their migratory flight path to their breeding areas in the Arctic.

A map of the flights of five red knots with geolocators attached and recovered in Padre Island , TXOver the last three years, we found our assumptions were wrong. First we learned from recovered geolocator data (tiny devices that record location) that birds did not leave Texas in the winter, but rather moved to the bay behind the Gulf beaches called the Laguna Madre. The Laguna spans hundreds of miles from Texas to Mexico. Its shallow waters of less than a few feet deep, fluctuate not so much by tide but wind. In other words, Texas knots spend 9 months of their lives in Texas.

This year we found out even more about the birds from tiny transmitters David Newstead attached to the few knots we did catch last fall. During the winter, he closely followed their movements and found a mother lode of knots. We thought 700 knots used TX before he started his search. After David’s discovery, the actual number may be more than 2000.

There’s more. After our discovery of knots in the Laguna, we thought they left the beach in the fall,spent thier winter in the Laguna and returned in spring to the gulf beach. As it turns out, the relationship between the two habitats is more complicated. David found that knot use varied with fluctuations in the water levels of Laguna Madre: At low levels, knots use the Laguna, at high water levels they use the beach. Our work this spring substantiated this pattern, when we started, levels were high in the Laguna but dropped steadily over the week. Correspondingly bird numbers on the beach were high when we started and lowered throughout the week.

David Newstead with TX knot in his hand. The progress of this study is testament to our work especially Davids and his team of professional and amateur volunteers, and the need for skilled field work. Like many studies done around the globe, this study sheds light on the intricate relationship of an animal and its environment. These studies are the backbone of any significant conservation effort that seeks to thread the needle through the needs of both animal and man. Without good wildife studies,  we are only guessing and ultimately wasting the already limited money that now goes into American wildlife conservation.

The work also points to the best way to get this valuable data in a cost effective way. In a world of diminishing resources devoted to conservation, volunteer professionals and amateurs amplify the work of paid staff. With the good use of volunteers, biologists, like David can accomplish so much more. This includes people like Frank Weaver a wildlife biologist for the USFWS working on other projects, and Phil Magasich, a volunteer hoping to help wildlife in a meaningful way. The Texas team like similar teams in South Carolina, Massachusetts and of coarse the Delaware Bay is the new way to make field work a reality in a time when too few people see it as crucial.The Texas banding crew.

jobs, shorebirds and a sunny day on a South Carolina beach

The crew heading out to Deveaux Bank, SCThe noonday sun bathed us with early but welcome warmth while we sat behind a dune on Deveaux Bank, SC. A gentle breeze kept us cool while we waited for the tide to rise and shrink the island where three thousand red knots roosted. The Atlantic ocean sprawled in all directions, the Islands of Seabrook and Kiawah within sight a few miles off. Inevitably the tide would force the knots onto the intertidal flat before us, where we had set a cannon net several hours earlier.

The crew setting the net was a mixed bag of characters such as, photographer/author, an English micro biologist, three biologists from the USFWS, including Melissa Bimbi, the southern lead on the listing of the red knot. The project leader Felicia Sanders brought several of her colleagues, Janet, Nick Kelly Jennifer. We all sat patiently praying for the birds to land in the area of the net and for the tide to push them high enough to be caught.

One of the volunteers, John Fisk, and I fell into a conversation about conservation. Retired from his practice as a surgeon, John now chairs a SC organization of master naturalists that do work on everything from turtles to eagles. We shared enthusiasm for the work of volunteers and the need to make it grow, but our talk drifted to the contentious subject of politics and environmentalism. The question was- are conservationists wary of economic development and thus out of step with nearly all Americans? As John put it, “Are conservationist allergic to jobs creation”

It's one of the most relevant questions facing conservationist these days. Our country is still reeling from the twin blows of war and nearly collapsed banking system. Too many people have lost their jobs or are work part time and want to be full time. For most, concern for wildlife is a distant one compared to making ends meet, educating children and the threat of more economic shocks.

The concerns of conservationists seem irrelevant to the struggle that many people face and yet it is central to most people who live in wild areas, the exact area that is a concern to conservationists.Rural poverty is widespread across the country and no more apparent in the inland areas of South Carolina. Ride through the flatwoods and the widespread poverty would shock most good people. Economists will argue about the cause, but it is not from a lack of wealth. Most of these rural landscapes support a mint in natural resources: farm products, forest products, fisheries. Unfortunately for people who live in these places the wealth goes mostly to large corporations. What wealth the companies confer on rural people, most often comes in the form of low wage jobs.   Even this ends up in the mitts of large corporations like Walmart, Dollar Store, and McDonalds. They cluster in the outskirts of most rural towns after shuttering most of the local businesses that once provided decent salaries for the local residents. The towns look like the one in the Back To the Future movies, the grim future town that had to be corrected by the hero played by Michael J. Fox. Unfortunately, there is no time machine to fix real life rural towns as they slowly desolve into the overexploited landscape.

Conservationists see all this and more. For decades, the leaders of large companies have walked roughshod over our nation's productive farmlands, forests and seas. Calls for reducing the impact of regulations to allow even greater destruction are common in Washington and our states. In the name of economic recovery, corporations want to take away milestones like the endangered species act, clean water act, and clean air act. No wonder conservationists distrust the motives of business titans.

This may be true, but rural people need help from conservationists as much as rural wildlife and the welfare of both depend on each other. The question should not be,  can conservationists create jobs,  but how can they create jobs based on sustainable resource use. John and I left our conversation on that note, how do conservationist create good paying jobs that support sustainable resource use. This is our most important endeavor in this time of economic instability.

Fortunately we had to cut short our deliberations on economics after all we were there to catch shorebirds. The tide rose, birds came and we sprung into action. After a few problems we caught over two hundred knots and faced a full afternoon's work ahead of us.John Fisk and Tom banding red knots

A sky white with snows (part 2)

In my last blog I described the growing impact of exploding Snow Goose populations and asked what can be done about it.

Some will blanch to hear that hunting is, without question, the best way to help this bird.  But each year hunters kill only about 50,000 birds, far less than the yearly production.  So even with liberal hunting seasons and bag limits, the population continues to grow.  Why aren't hunters killing more? 

Part of the reason is the skill necessary to kill Snows.  It is a tricky operation that sometimes requires hundreds of decoys to bring the birds into a field.  Another is the inefficiency of the hunt.  Here in Greenwich, NJ, one can hear a few, distant shotgun blasts in the early morning light followed by the raucous explosion of thousands of geese lifting off to another field -- which is very likely unhunted. One has to question if a shorter, more organized season might be better if only because more hunters would be shooting the same flocks at the same time.

The bigger problem for those who wish to bring the population down to about 500,000 birds -- the population goal set by biologists -- is that hunters hate to eat Snow Geese.  The USFWS service and the state agencies have done much to get hunter to re-imagine Snows as good-eating, going so far as to produce a cookbook.   It may have helped, but the bird is an ordeal.  I’ve eaten snow goose in the Arctic while we were in the field.   After eating mostly beans and winter vegetables, fresh meat of any kind was a bonus.  Even then, it took some getting used to.

Maybe another part of the solution is to consider allowing wider access to Snow Goose meat.   Now, geese and every other game animal cannot be sold for the market.  Early hero’s of conservation, like Aldo Leopold, erected this immutable barrier to stop the carnage of wildlife for profit, and they would look at any breach of that barrier as a defeat for wildlife.  Looking at how we treat fish in Delaware Bay, I have to agree.  Most conservationists think the era of market hunting ended in the early 1900's with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.  For my part, market hunting is in full swing on  Delaware Bay fish populations where the greed of a few big players commands the system of fishery management to the detriment of species they are supposed to sustain.  Opening up a new expression for greedy exploitation of wildlife may be playing with the devil.

 But there is one path.   There is a growing awareness in our Country that our methods of industrial meat production are immoral, unhealthy for humans and the environment and are, ultimately, unsustainable as global demand for meat continues grow and will double by 20501. 

This awareness spawns a fast-growing segment of the food and restaurant trade dedicated to the humane treatment of a small contingent of the 60 billion pigs, cows and poultry slaughtered annually (10 billion in the US alone) for our consumption1.   Supplying snow geese for these restaurants, with young chefs who hunger for new gastronomic challenges, would be the fastest way to find new recipes that would make Snow Goose delicious; (my son, the new head chef at St Vincents in San Francisco, says "all game is good depending on the preparation") .  More people eating Snow Geese would accelerate their successful management.   The animal that is now drifting toward the ignominy that befell the Canada Goose, might just find it's way back to our good graces.   

For me, the snow goose is already there.   They are as much a part of the Delaware Bay as Bald Eagles and shorebirds, and all deserve our appreciation and care.  

1.  Bittman, Mark.  2009.  Food Matters:  A Guide to Conscious Eating with more than 75 recipes.  Simon &  Schuster, New York, NY.