Collecting Data to Understand Migrations of Pacific Red Knots

Willapa Bay and neighboring Grays Harbor are the most important spring stopover sites for Pacific Red Knots (Calidris canutus roselaari) in the entire Pacific Flyway (Buchanan et al. 2011). A large proportion, possibly all, of the global population funnels through these two coastal Washington estuaries each spring on the way to breeding grounds in far northern Russia and Alaska. The subspecies numbers around 21,700 birds , making it the smallest of six Red Knot populations worldwide, and it's on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Immediate Action Watch List for species of conservation concern. This past May, I spent a few days in Westport with Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) partners for the first field season of a new effort focused on answering some questions about this subspecies.

This work in Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor isn't new. Joe Buchanan, recently retired from WDFW, spent decades of his career identifying Washington’s role in the Pacific Flyway story for this species. That long-running effort is now in Allison Anholt's hands at WDFW. She's leading a new project funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with Jason Loghry coordinating the field work. The goal is to deploy satellite tags on individual Pacific Red Knots to fill some critical knowledge gaps: where birds go between Washington and the Arctic, what the poorly understood southbound migration looks like, and, increasingly important, how high and where they fly. This first year is focused on trialing capture methods and resighting and banding birds, with tagging happening when conditions allow. The satellite tagging work will scale up in year two.

My trip centered on a day out at Ellen Sands Island, an important stopover site within Willapa Bay. Our team of four took an airboat across the bay and split the work once we arrived. We started with flag resights, scanning flocks for the coded leg flags that connect individual birds to capture sites across the flyway. Then we spread out for a full census of every shorebird on the island. The Red Knots - around 400 of them - were the focus, many already in bright breeding plumage, fueling up for the long flight ahead. Mixed in were Dunlin, Western Sandpipers, Sanderlings, Black-bellied and Semipalmated Plovers, Hudsonian Whimbrels, and Ruddy Turnstones, with flocks of Brant and American White Pelicans on the water nearby and Caspian Terns calling overhead.

Audubon Washington is a member of the Roselaari Working Group, which brings together partners from WDFW, USFWS, and many others across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to coordinate research and conservation for this subspecies across its full range. The birds don't recognize national boundaries, and neither does the science. Filling the information gaps that conservation decisions depend on requires sustained partnerships at the flyway scale. Supporting the partners doing that work - through coordination, science, storytelling, and showing up when we're needed - is core to what our Coasts Program is here to do.

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