Godwit watcher in for the long haul

[Sally Furniss]

More on the Godwits

Godwit watcher in for the long haul
By SALLY KIDSON - Nelson | Saturday, 19 July 2008


Working for two months in damp, freezing conditions to monitor birds would not be everyone's idea of a good time, but for Marlborough Sounds-based ornithologist Rob Schuckard it was a dream come true.
Schuckard has just returned from spending two months volunteering in the Alaskan Tundra next to the Bering Sea for the United States Geological Survey.
The trip was partially funded by the US Government for bird flu surveillance, and Schuckard's tasks included catching and taking samples for signs of bird flu from Arctic migrants the red knot and the bar-tailed godwit.

He also helped monitor the endangered spectacled eider duck, whose habitat is at risk from the expansion of oil drilling in the Bering Sea.
He was with a core group of four, camping in the Yukon Kuskokwim Refuge, a reserve slightly smaller than the North Island, here the bar-tailed godwits breed.
The 77,000km wildlife refuge has the highest density and diversity of breeding shorebirds in the Americas.

Schuckard is a member of the New Zealand Ornithological Society and has worked with the US Geological Survey around New Zealand, including in the Nelson region, on groundbreaking research fitting bar-tailed godwits with satellite trackers.

Such research has confirmed the small birds cover the 12,000km from Alaska to New Zealand non-stop, over seven to nine days. These champion commuters return to Alaska at the end of the New Zealand summer via Asia, completing a staggering 28,000km round trip.

Sadly, the population of bar-tailed godwits is in steep decline, dropping from about 155,000 in the 1990s to an estimated 90,000 today.

Schuckard said seeing and hearing the courtship activities of godwits on the breeding grounds, with their noisy aerial displays, was incredible.
"To be lying in my tent in the middle of the night in the middle of all the things we'd heard about was absolutely amazing."

While it was great to be in Alaska, it was also hard work.

With the tundra thawing around them, their campsite was sometimes flooded and they were working in damp and very cold conditions.
"It's just one big soggy place over there."

He arrived in Alaska on April 24, when temperatures were well below 0degC, in time to see flocks of godwits arrive.

The first godwits were seen on May 7, with up to 300 birds passing through daily.

It was a particular buzz to see a bird bearing a colour band to show it had been marked in New Zealand, he said. While the godwits arrived in big groups, they spread out to breed, with only one godwit nest per 1.5km.

Schuckard said it was extremely difficult to locate the godwits nests, which are at ground level among the lichen.

The only way to find the nests is to spend painstaking hours watching the birds, in the hope of catching them change over from sitting on the nests. Many nests on the tundra failed because of predation from foxes, sandhill cranes, skuas and mink.

While most godwits are in Alaska at this time of the year, adolescents - those up to three years old - can be seen in the Nelson winter at Farewell Spit, the Motueka sandspit, the Waimea Inlet and other tidal areas.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/nelsonmail/4624144a19260.html

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

If godwit eggs can carry AI, then the sandhill cranes will transport the pathogen to the midwestern US states.

Just imagine - that crane species is said to be 2.5 million years old, so they could have been spreading AI between the continents for 2.5 million years.

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[Sally Furniss]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

Bar-tailed Godwit (Limosa lapponica)​

One of the goals of this project is to understand how the different Bar-tailed Godwit subspecies use the Pacific Basin. L. l. baueri, a major focus of this study, breeds in western Alaska from Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta up to North Slope as far east as Colville River Delta. This subspecies appears to spend the Boreal winter mainly in New Zealand and southeast Australia, which is why we are putting satellite tags on birds in both New Zealand (in Feb 2007 and 2008) and in Alaska (June 2007). In February 2008 we also began a study of the L. l. menzbieri population that nests in northeastern Siberia and spends the Boreal winter in western Australia.

Life History

In North America, this large (males 250-350 g, females 300-500g) shorebird is only commonly found in western and northern Alaska during the summer (where it breeds) and fall. In fall, it stages in spectacular concentrations along the coast of the Yukon-Kukskokwim Delta and further south on the Alaska Peninsula before departing on the longest non-stop migration known for any shorebird species, across the Pacific Ocean down to New Zealand and southeast Australia.
Up to five subspecies of Bar-tailed Godwits (Limosa lapponica) are recognized, breeding from northern Norway to western and northern Alaska.
Breeding biology

Bar-tailed Godwits breed in open tundra, usually in better drained areas, but sometimes in wet basins and other poorly drained areas. They form a cup nest on the tundra and almost always lay 4 eggs. Young hatch after 20-21 days and are almost immediately mobile. Chicks can fly at about 29 days, and soon after that parents leave the chicks. Both young and adult birds move from nesting areas to staging sites along the coast of Alaska to fatten for their open-ocean, non-stop migration to Australasia. Birds form large flocks along the Alaska coast in the late summer and fall, feeding mainly on clams and worms, but also on seeds and berries to fuel their flights.

Migration

The southward migration of baueri is the longest non-stop migration of any bird, in some cases birds are flying over 11,000 km from Alaska to New Zealand without stopping. The northward migration of baueri occurs in two long flights, the first from New Zealand and eastern Australia to the Yellow Sea and the second from there to Alaska. We hope to learn more about the northward flight of menzbieri, but it too is known to at least stop in the Yellow Sea. Much less is known about its southward migration, particularly once the birds leave the breeding grounds in Siberia.

Conservation status

It is estimated that 100,000-150,000 Bar-tailed Godwits breed in Alaska. Under the US Shorebird Conservation Plan, they are a species of High Concern mainly due to their small population size, threats to their non-breeding grounds (especially at migratory stopover sites in Asia), and their relatively restricted breeding distribution within the United States.
Text courtesy of PRBO

http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/shorebirds/barg.html

 

[gsgs]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

why don't they breed in NZ ?

apparantly they don't transport flu-viruses.

They don't contact Alaska-birds

 

[Sally Furniss]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

NZ is the wintering ground. They can't breed twice in a year.

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

why don't they breed in NZ ?

apparantly they don't transport flu-viruses.

They don't contact Alaska-birds

The sandhill crane referenced in the article IS an Alaskan bird.

They breed in the arctic because of an abundance of food, 24 hours of light to find food, less food competition from local birds, and fewer predators.

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[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

.....apparantly they don't transport flu-viruses......

.....tested rRT-PCR positive for AI viruses, samples from only 2 species of shorebirds (bar-tailed godwit [Limosa lapponica] and dunlin [Calidris alpina]) were positive,.....

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2435106#B15

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[gsgs]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

thanks. Maybe it made more sense in ancient times, when they
learned to cross the globe and now it's no big avantage
and they become extinct.
Tell them to fly to the Westsibirian wetlands, like the other birds !
Well, maybe they can't compete with the ducks,geese etc.



no statistics of serotypes in the sampling study :-(

they could have said whether they found Eurasian or Australian viruses



are they storing the samples and we will get the sequences
(once sequencing becomes cheap)

 

[Oracle]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

Thanks for posting the link to that informative paper, Denise. Very interesting comment on possibility of dietary sources of RT-PCR inhibitors. This problem of naturally occurring organics interfering with DNA recovery and amplification steps has been noted elsewhere - for example, environmental microbial ecology literature over the past decade, where natural soil matrix carbon and anthropogenic contaminants force additional cleanup steps in sequential sample preps that may also diminish a weak signal (low abundance genetic material) to the point of nondetection.

Geographic distribution differences among sampling regions reflects species habitat variation, correct?

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Godwit watcher in for the long haul

..........Geographic distribution differences among sampling regions reflects species habitat variation, correct?

from paper:

Our study could not determine if the geographic variation resulted from inherent habitat characteristics that influence virus persistence and transfer, or from variation in characteristics of species or populations.

There could be other factors, e.g., the lower incidence areas are comparatively flat (except sourtheastern) - which might influence defensive behaviors and subsequent "mixing." The areas might correlate to the spring thaw schedule. Those areas that thaw early present more opportunity for pathogen mixing, while the latest thawing (Arctic Coastal Plain) would present the least opportunity.

These habitats are changing rapidly (double more temperate regions) due to climate change - more permafrost thawing, earlier thawing, flora/fauna "moving" north, & predators also moving north.

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