Shorebird Recovery Project

Restoring Shorebird Populations and Ecosystems Across the Americas

Imagine that this spring you were born, or hatched actually, as a shorebird—a Red Knot, in fact, of the rufa subspecies. You’re in the Canadian arctic, it’s now early summer, and you’re as big as a small potato but weigh only 5 ounces (same as an iPhone). And, so far, you’ve avoided the many predators that attempt to make you their next meal, day and night. Continue reading...

Purpose

The Shorebird Recovery Project is about more than shorebirds…

The awe-inspiring feats of shorebirds not only capture our imagination and respect, but also sharpen our awareness of just how much their survival depends upon having healthy ecosystems from pole to pole and coast to coast. Ours does too.

Development, contaminants, and disturbance. Loss of habitat. Climate change. Degradation of sources for clean water and nutrient-rich foods. These same threats that are causing drastic declines in shorebird populations—with some species facing extinction in our lifetime— are likewise affecting other species’ well being. Ours too.

But most vulnerable to these threats are shorebirds and other migratory species that continually travel the globe, in rhythm with the changing seasons, for their survival. As such, these remarkable natural athletes serve as sentinels for the health of the very ecosystems that sustain our way of life too. Their arctic tundra is our First Nation peoples’ subsistence grounds; their interior grasslands are where our farmers raise cattle and crops; their wetlands purify our drinking water, recharge our aquifers, and protect us from flood waters; and their coastal beaches and waters are our places for recreation, tourism, and local and commercial fisheries. Their fate and ours are inevitably one.

Halting the decline of shorebirds is an enormous challenge. It means, in large part, protecting and managing a vast constellation of places dotting the hemisphere where shorebirds go for their survival —from northern breeding grounds to southern wintering grounds and all the resting and refueling sites in between. Thankfully, their most challenging characteristic—migration—is also what serves to connect the places and communities that “share” them throughout the year. It also means conducting more advanced and coordinated research to fill the sizeable gaps in our knowledge still about the size and trend of individual species’ populations, migration patterns, and other critical information.

The daunting task of recovering species at this scale and scope can only be accomplished by working collaboratively with many partners: academic and agency scientists, individual landowners, corporations, all levels of government, other conservation organizations, schools, community groups, and the funding community. When we work together across the hemisphere to protect shorebirds and their resources, we are in turn protecting and improving the quality of life for ourselves.

Such is the motivation, the mission, and the approach for the Shorebird Recovery Project, a hemispheric initiative spearheaded by Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences to recover our most imperiled shorebird populations. This partnership-based initiative integrates and builds upon three of Manomet’s long-standing pillars:

• The site-based conservation of the ever-growing Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN);
• The science-based, cutting-edge research led by shorebird experts Brian Harrington, Stephen Brown, Shiloh Schulte, and their colleagues; and
• The tools for monitoring and measuring shorebirds’ response to conservation efforts (“success measures”), and adapting our actions or research accordingly.