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Identifying collaborative research opportunities

Restoration of river herring is critical to restoring the health of lakes, ponds, rivers and streams, coastal food webs, and marine fisheries. Five years ago, the Downeast Fisheries Partnership held the first workshop focused on community-based restoration efforts. At the end of that meeting, fisherman and steward Bailey Bowden stood up and said, "I had no idea that anybody else cared about river herring as much as I do. I had no idea that there are scientists that study river herring. And, I had no idea that restoring river herring was critical to bringing back cod and haddock." Since those early days, Manomet and our partners have been working to build connections between research scientists and communities committed to restoring...

Human Welfare and Shorebird Conservation – How are they Connected?

Until just a few decades ago, biodiversity conservation was carried out without the involvement of the human communities that depend on it for their livelihoods. Biodiversity conservation is now defined by its intrinsic relationship with human beings and their dependence on it and how human communities impact and/or contribute to its management. An often overlooked aspect of conservation is that our existence and welfare as human beings depends almost entirely on the benefits that we derive from nature. These benefits can be called “ecosystem services.” We are unaware of any important areas for shorebirds, whether it be breeding areas, migration stopovers, or wintering sites, that do not simultaneously contribute either tangibly or intangibly to human welfare. These areas, due to...

Fall 2020—Manomet Magazine

I love reading these magazine articles because they fill me with much hope and pride in Manomet’s work and staff and often take me on a short journey. As I joined Manomet mid-pandemic, I haven’t had the opportunity to visit any of our field sites, so the shorebirds article in this issue offers me an image of places I don’t yet know. It is extraordinary to see the breadth of partnerships we have established to ensure the right stakeholders are at the table, helping design the change we all want to see and navigating the myriad demands on the resources. Speaking of partners, we also introduce you to our work with the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries (MCCF) in this issue....

Setting the stage for fisheries recoveries

On a sunny Saturday in spring 2019, several hundred people gathered to watch the spectacle of alewives making their way up a tributary of the Bagaduce River to Pierce’s Pond in Penobscot, a community on the shores of Maine’s Penobscot Bay. Kids and adults marveled at the powerful instinct that drives this small fish to work its way upstream. Ospreys and eagles circled overhead, looking for an opportunity to snatch a meal from the teeming waters. But this lively natural event hasn’t always been so, and there is still a lot of potential for conservation progress. Manomet and partners like the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries (MCCF) are working closely with local communities in Downeast Maine and other nonprofits like...

Recovering shorebird populations from the ground up: An update on the Coalitions for Shorebird Conservation

As a young teenage birder, my father regaled me with anecdotes about how bird populations had changed since his youth. At the time, the thirty-plus years of conservation efforts that restored some species to their historic population levels did not cross my mind. Now the realities of shorebird conservation underpin my every day, working with researchers and citizen scientists throughout the Western Hemisphere. Shorebird conservation is not for the faint of heart. From sleepless nights wandering grasslands in Uruguay to capture and band Buff-breasted Sandpipers (Calidris subruficollis), to trekking through rain-filled bison wallows in Kansas to count the various shorebird species using them as habitat, the effort required is tremendous. To learn about where shorebirds go, their needs when they...

For shorebirds, every quiet, peaceful moment counts

A Red Knot, traveling on a journey from South America north up to the Arctic tundra to nest, has a narrow time frame when the tide is just right for the sand to be moist enough for its nutritious food resources to be accessible. After feeding frantically, the bird must find a quiet, safe bit of sand to roost on, resting while it digests and converts that food into fat that will fuel its migration. While it rests, the bird will preen, ensuring that its feathers are in top form to fly thousands of miles or to dodge hungry raptors that it might encounter. But instead of finding that quiet, peaceful beach to do the work of being a Red...

Wallowing About in Search of Shorebirds

Thirty to sixty million big and shaggy American bison (Bison bison) once roamed North America’s Great Plains (USFWS). This enormous number of bison moved across the landscape, eating grasses, trampling and fertilizing the prairie, and pawing at and rolling about in the dirt. The latter behavior resulted in shallow depressions called bison wallows. Bison shaped their landscape by creating a patchwork of short grasses where the herd grazed, taller grasses where they hadn’t grazed, and disturbed, shallow depressions where bison wallowed the prairie to dust themselves for insect control. This process of altering the landscape’s surface through their activities means that bison were keystone species, supporting a greater variety of plants and wildlife through their grazing and wallowing behavior (Knapp...

Fall 2020 Banding Season, Week 2: August 24—28

The drought in the northeast has certainly been felt by the trees. We've noticed some branches of trees are holding the first hint of fall colors in their leaves. It also seems that we've been picking more leaves than usual out of the nets so early in the season. We finished the week with 94 new birds banded, 56 recaptures processed, and 12 new species for the week including Northern Waterthrush, Veery, and Yellow-bellied Flycatcher. Our two week total now is 260 new birds banded and 103 recaptures with 31 species captured so far. Heat and humidity returned in full force on Monday and Tuesday, each day we closed nets early as it got too hot to band. Gray Tree...

Five years of U360

Solving today’s complex global issues in a way that balances economic, social, and environmental concerns requires bringing together diverse groups of people. In particular, today’s college students and young professionals need to be actively engaged; that’s where Manomet’s U360 Business Sustainability Internship comes in. Today, there are countless opportunities for college students who want to complete an internship or experience real-world learning outside of the classroom. What distinguishes U360 from other options is its innovative approach of connecting students with small business owners for direct, real-world learning. “U360 has been primarily a virtual program since it started, so COVID-19 had little impact on last year’s interns completing the school year,” says Lora Babb, U360 program manager. “While it wasn’t quite...

Fall 2020 Banding Season, Week 1: August 17—21

Our first week of fall banding for the 2020 season is complete! After testing negative for COVID-19 and traveling under the restrictions that Massachusetts has put in place, the banders were ready for work. The jungle that had grown up along the net lanes during spring and summer has been fought back to make room for the 50 nets. Portions of the net lanes that are usually bare dirt are overgrown with low growing Path Rush (Juncus tenuis) from the lack of banders traveling the paths in the spring. We banded 166 new birds our first week; an even 100 of which were Gray Catbirds. The first bird we captured was a hatch-year Carolina Wren with a Gray Catbird not...