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The Journey of a Migratory Shorebird
On a sunny June morning, in a bog outside Beluga, Alaska, I met a Hudsonian godwit. She had inky eyes and a long, slightly upturned beak that was pinkish-orange at its base and brownish-black at its tip. The feathers on her back were of mottled sepia tones, and those on her belly were rusty brown and painterly white. Her legs reminded me of the slender inserts of spring-loaded ballpoint pens, and her feet were refined pterodactyl claws. Her name (among humans) was A34, and she was about the size of a city pigeon. She was in the hands of Nathan Senner, a conservation biologist, who removed and replaced her geotag; measured her head, beak, wing, and leg; weighed her; and took two tail feathers and a sample of her blood. From that small number of data points, he can deduce where she’s been, how her feathers have grown, what genetic subgroup she belongs to, and her degree of exposure to mercury.
Senner leads a research laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that is largely focussed on how migratory shorebirds, such as godwits, respond to environmental change. He grew up in Anchorage, where school loudspeakers announced the street corners on which moose had been sighted. In high school, he wrote an occasional “Birding with Nathan” column for the Anchorage Daily News. Senner’s father, Stanley, has devoted more than five decades to the conservation of migratory shorebirds. Starting in the nineteen-seventies, Stanley and his colleagues have been sounding the alarm on the vulnerability of shorebirds and working to protect key habitats, such as Alaska’s Copper River Delta. “Back then, no one was even talking about climate change,” he told me recently. Since 1980, roughly half of migratory shorebird species’ populations have declined by more than fifty per cent.
Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love.
Relatively few people have laid eyes on Hudsonian godwits. The birds mostly divide their time between remote northern bogs and muddy South American shores. John James Audubon apparently never saw a living one; he based his drawing of them in “Birds of America” on a few specimens he found in markets. Arthur Cleveland Bent, in a 1927 installment of his twenty-one-volume series, “Life Histories of North American Birds,” wrote of Hudsonian godwits, “I can count on the fingers of one hand the red-letter days when I have been privileged to see this rare and handsome wader.”
It’s entirely possible that I had encountered A34 two months before seeing her in Alaska. In March, I had travelled from New York to Chiloé Island, in Chilean Patagonia. Flocks of Hudsonian godwits (the smallest of the four godwit species and the least well known) spend from roughly early October to April in and around the tidal mudflats there. The island also has Humboldt penguins, giant rhubarb plants with leaves as large as umbrellas, and the world’s smallest species of deer. Castro, the main town, is famous for its brightly painted wooden seaside houses, which rest on tall stilts to accommodate the tide. Homo sapiens is a shore-loving species. About forty per cent of us live within sixty miles of a coast.
Chiloé is where Hudsonian godwits spend their non-breeding season and express their non-breeding personality, which is intensely gregarious and food-oriented. If you walk at low tide on the mudflats of Pullao Bay, you will see godwits bobbing for bivalves and