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Kicking Off The 53rd Spring At Manomet’s Banding Lab
Is anyone else getting the sense that we may, in fact, have fallen into a perpetual winter for eternity here in New England? Well, despite rampant Nor’easters and high temps still just scraping the mid-to-upper 40s, spring has arrived at Manomet HQ, along with the new team of spring bird banders! On April 15, the team of four—along with Trevor Lloyd-Evans, Director, Landbird Conservation, and Evan Dalton, Lead Instructor, Landbird Conservation—made short work of setting up all 50 mist nets around Manomet’s 40-acre research facility. This kicks off the lab’s 53rd spring season of data collection and educational programming. We don’t know about you, but the staff at Manomet headquarters couldn’t be more excited to welcome the new team and all the visitors—both...
Meet Sachem!
Brad Winn, Manomet’s Director of Shorebird Habitat Management, and Alan Kneidel, Shorebird Biologist, spent a weekend in early September 2017 in Wellfleet, MA, studying large, Arctic-breeding shorebirds called Whimbrel that depend on Cape Cod saltmarshes during migration; meet Sachem, a young bird that the researchers were able to fit with a satellite transmitter. Sachem (pronounced Saychem) means an individual selected to represent a tribe or band of tribes in the Algonquin language. Since this individual Whimbrel represents the bird tribe Numeniini which faces many challenges worldwide, Winn feels this name is a good fit at several levels. Tracking this bird from signals emitted from the tiny transmitter over the next several years will reveal the secrets of Whimbrel migration ecology. “The more we know about...
2015 Fellowship Awards Announced
The Emily “Paddy” V. Wade Fellowship for Science is awarded annually for the purpose of funding “discovery science”—science that contributes to our basic understanding of the natural world. The award was established to honor Paddy Wade who served as Chair of the Board of Trustees of Manomet from 1993 to 2010 and continues to serve as member of the Board of Trustees today. This year’s awardee is Brad Winn, Director Shorebird Habitat Management. He will be conducting a field research project titled: Identifying Migration Strategies of Hatch-Year Whimbrels. Using solar powered transmitters and Argos Satellites, this project holds significant potential for major scientific discovery. There is virtually nothing known about the migration paths used by juvenile Whimbrels on...
Coats Island Researchers Check Whimbrel Stopover Point
Before Manomet researchers left Coats Island in Hudson Bay this summer, the team examined a nearby site that was recently discovered as a possible staging location for Whimbrels during their migration from the Arctic to South America. Manomet’s Brad Winn has worked with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the Center for Conservation Biology over the past few years to put satellite transmitters on Whimbrels. Winn and the partner organizations observed that one of the birds stopped on Coats Island in two different years after nesting in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The bird spent about a month on the island before undertaking a 4,000-mile journey over the Atlantic Ocean to the north coast of Brazil. “We knew...
Whimbrel Tracking Project Reveals New Staging Areas, Confirms Importance of WHSRN
In mid-April, five Whimbrels tagged with satellite transmitters flew from their wintering grounds on the coast of Brazil to three separate staging areas in the Gulf of Mexico and one site in coastal Georgia. These flights have revealed the third leg of a previously unknown loop migration route and identified several sites that may be important staging areas for the large shorebirds. These “staging” or “stopover” locations, which are rich in food resources, are critical to the birds before undertaking long flights. Manomet’s Brad Winn has partnered with Fletcher Smith from the Center for Conservation Biology, and Tim Keyes with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources in this effort to study the migration ecology of Whimbrels in the eastern...