Boreal Shorebird Bonanza and a Barbados Connection
Lesser yellowlegs are currently migrating through Maine from their Boreal Forest nesting grounds. The authors saw this one during low tide near the Yarmouth Town Landing. Courtesy of Jeff Wells
The authors saw a few short-billed dowitchers (left in photo) - note the very long bill - among the yellowlegs recently in Yarmouth. Courtesy of Jeff Wells
Least sandpipers are tiniest of North America's shorebirds. They are regular migrants across the state in the fall. Courtesy of Jeff Wells
Lesser yellowlegs are currently migrating through Maine from their Boreal Forest nesting grounds. The authors saw this one during low tide near the Yarmouth Town Landing. Courtesy of Jeff Wells
The authors saw a few short-billed dowitchers (left in photo) - note the very long bill - among the yellowlegs recently in Yarmouth. Courtesy of Jeff Wells
Least sandpipers are tiniest of North America's shorebirds. They are regular migrants across the state in the fall. Courtesy of Jeff Wells
We stumbled upon a surprising concentration of shorebirds a few days ago. If you’ve ever driven down Interstate 295 to Portland, you have driven over the Royal River where it empties into the harbor in Yarmouth. The town landing is right below the highway there, on the north side of harbor. We stopped by near low tide, the mudflats extending out and glistening in the sun.
There on the flats, birds darted about, picking carefully around for food. More than a hundred birds, in fact. Most were sporting long, bright yellow legs.
Yes, they were yellowlegs.
There are two flavors of yellowlegs—lesser and greater. As you would expect, one is larger than the other, and there are some other differences as well. But, they can occasionally seem rather devious in hiding their true identities. The bulk of the birds here seemed to be lesser yellowlegs.
But both species nest exclusively in bogs and heathlands across the Boreal Forest biome of Canada and Alaska. Birds hatched this summer have neat, unworn plumage with lots of white spots on the back, making them easy to tell apart from the adults. Most of the birds we saw at the landing were juvenile birds, suggesting perhaps a good nesting season this summer in some part of the Boreal Forest region.
As we scanned through the concentration, we spotted a few very long billed birds with shorter legs—short-billed dowitchers. They, like the two species of yellowlegs, also raise their young in the cool, squishy, earthy-smelling environs of sphagnum-dominated bogs within the Boreal Forest biome of Canada and Alaska. A handful of the tiniest of shorebirds, least sandpipers—very rusty brown with yellow legs—were huddled along the edge of a little stream that cut through the mudflat. They too breed mostly in the Boreal Forest, with some nesting just to the north along the southern edge of the Arctic tundra.
It was as if we had been given a birder’s gift straight from the Canadian Boreal Forest.
These birds would soon be on their way southward, some headed as far away as South America. Some would fly non-stop for days and nights over the ocean, maybe going all the way without stopping, maybe finding a small wetland on a Caribbean island to rest and refuel.
Barbados is one of those islands that yellowlegs and many other shorebirds must have stopped off at for millenia. The island was inhabitated by Arawak peoples when the first Portuguese and Spanish explorers made their way to the island. By the 1600s, these Indigenous inhabitants were gone, and Barbados eventually became an English colony.
The hunting of shorebirds that stop over on Barbados during fall migration started in the early years of colonization because food was limited on the relatively small island. Over the centuries, people realized that they could construct small wetlands that would lure shorebirds in; many of these became hunting club properties.
Unfortunately, large-scale unregulated hunting of shorebirds was happening throughout many parts of the Americas. At the same time, shorebirds also faced loss of wetlands and other habitats they need, as well as dangers from pesticides, and other issues. We lost the Eskimo curlew by the 1960s; in fact, the last individual documented with certainty was one harvested on Barbados in 1963. Today, many shorebird species, including the lesser yellowlegs and the short-billed dowitcher, have experienced major declines.
Now, many former shorebird hunters from Barbados have become conservationists. A new film produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology called “The Last Curlew” showcases these changes and will be debuted on Friday, September 4 at 7 PM, hosted by the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and the Barbados Shorebird Conservation Trust. The good news is that the event will be livestreamed for the whole world at: https://www.youtube.com/@thebarbadosmuseum.
We hope you’ll tune in.
Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Down East Books) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).
