2-2. James Bay – Longridge Camp, Ontario. 5 to 10 August 2019

    Adult male Hudsonian Godwit rising from flooded tidal flat

The main reason I was here at the Longridge Camp was to immerse myself in the spectacle of staging Hudsonian Godwits. These wonderful birds are the most common large shorebird here on the coast of James Bay in mid-August. I saw godwits every day I was at the Camp.

    Adult male Hudsonian Godwit flushing with 4 Semipalmated Plovers and White-rumped Sandpiper (right)

Considering that before I started this Project I had observed godwits only three times in 50 years of birding, this was a special treat, indeed. I saw godwits foraging, loafing, flying about, calling, being flushed by a passing Merlin or Peregrine, you name it!

    Longridge Camp from the air. No electricity but nice housing (a hunting camp of a Moose Cree family)

But to see the godwits I had to pay my dues, by participating in the duties demanded of each team-mate of the James Bay Shorebird Project. Each day I either joined another team-mate on a shorebird walking survey, or I assisted with the bird-banding operation.

    A flagged and banded Lesser Yellowlegs

A walking survey involved following a transect through the marsh and counting shorebirds present in a series of half-kilometer strips of habitat. This was done near high tide, when the birds are pushed up off the flats and in greater concentrations—hypothetically making the easier to count.

    Black Bears were seen nearly daily and came in to camp to check things out

The first day that I joined a walking survey I simply was not physically capable of keeping up and had to turn around and limp home. A very humbling experience! After a few days practice I was able to keep up, but I never felt 100% comfortable with the very demanding routine. Of course, I was the oldest member of the team.

    Doug McRae spishing for songbirds in the interior of the Enchanted Forest, south of camp

Doug McRae took me out on survey a number of days and I was dumbfounded by his ability to identify shorebirds under any conditions, identifying each bird (sitting or flying) to species and plumage (adult or juvenile). Even at great distance…

   A flock of White-rumped Sandpipers, displaying their white rumps

Doug’s ability to count the birds was remarkable as well. A huge flock would go by and within a few seconds he would calmly state “550.” Doug has been doing this for many years, so I suppose for some people practice makes perfect. I was unable to match Doug’s capacities, and I was happy to serve as the lowly scribe, writing down in a rain-proof notebook the birds he was identifying and counting and dictating to me.

    A close up of a molting adult male White-rumped sandpiper in the wrack

On other days I joined Ross Wood to assist him with the bird netting and banding. He had 10 nets arrayed in a corner of the marsh and he attracted shorebirds into the nets using a playback speaker that featured the voices of a number of shorebird species. Believe it or not, the birds would come in and happily foraging in and among the nets (even the godwits), occasionally getting caught but on most occasions zipping over and under the nets with ease.

     Ross Wood processing a shorebird as Doug McRae looks on

Ross and his assistant Angelika, would capture about 30 shorebird individuals per day, which was plenty, considering the amount of effort that went into measuring and processing these birds. Some birds (Lesser Yellowlegs) were tagged with a satellite transmitter, as part of a hemisphere-wide project on the species. Other birds were given a nano-tag that would communicate with MOTUS towers set up in strategic sites in Canada and the US and southward. These tags would signal to a MOTUS tower if the bird flew within about a kilometer of it. Finally, Ross flagged Red Knots and several other species of interest. These birds received a numbered flag on one leg and an aluminum band on the other. Flagged birds could be recorded by observers without recapture.

    Various curious Paleozoic fossils were present in the shoreline rocks. Is this a stromatolite?

Another task for the Team was to read the flags of those flagged shorebirds that passed through our site. Birds are being flagged in many locations across the hemisphere. Flag-reading involved reading the color and numbers-letterscoding on the flag on the bird’s leg, which required a good telescope and sharp eyes…

    Pairs of flying Sandhill Cranes were a common site in the open meadows

All this work provides important data on the movement and status of shorebirds in the Western Hemisphere. Many species have been shown to be in decline, and this work provides up-to-date information on their status and movements, year by year.

    An adult Little Gull was found with a large flock of Bonaparte's Gulls near the banding station

During my time there, the most abundant shorebird was the White-rumped Sandpiper, which could been seen in flocks of hundreds and thousands. This bird dominated the flocks out on the flats. This is of interest, because along the East Coast of the US, the species is rather uncommon…

    This gives a sense of the open marshy vistas along the shoreline....

Other shorebird species recorded here include: American Golden-Plover, Black-bellied Plover, Killdeer, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Red Knot, Least and Semipalmated Sandpiper, Short-billed Dowitcher, Spotted and Solitary Sandpiper, and Buff-breasted Sandpiper. The two rarest of this list were Buff-breasted and the Golden-Plover. We saw these as singletons.

    A young Northern Shrike traveled with a parent along the spruces and willows  at the forest edge

A third blog from James Bay will appear in a few days, and will wrap what I saw and learned while there.

    Can you see the Yellow Rail? Neither can I! I just hear its ticking notes nearby.... This is prime Yellow Rail habitat...