Chris Wood and Jessie Barry are the primary leaders for the 2010 Young Birders’ Event August 12-15 in Ithaca, NY.

Applications are due April 15. You can read more about last year’s exceedingly successful meeting on line at the Cornell Lab’s website.

Will Russell and David Sibley have returned from Thailand, where they were studying Spoon-billed Sandpipers at the traditional site at Pak Thale in the northern Gulf of Thailand.  They saw multiple birds every day, with a maximum of six.

Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Thailand. Photo: Jon Dunn.

Will writes: “From the point where six Spoon-bills were visible at once, by spinning slowly around one could also see about 300 Eurasian Curlews, one Far Eastern curlew, 50 Black-tailed Godwits, 10 Bar-tailed Godwits, six Ruffs, 250 Great Knots, 15 Red Knots, six Nordmann’s Greenshanks, 20 Common Greenshanks, 30 Spotted Redshanks, 400 Marsh Sandpipers, 300 Curlew Sandpipers, six Dunlin, 400 Little Stints, 20 Long-toed Stints, 15 Broad-billed Sandpipers, five Common Sandpipers, 30 Pacific Golden-Plovers, 10 Black-bellied Plovers, 100 Kentish Plovers, 150 Greater Sand-Plovers, 80 Lesser Sand-Plovers, and one Malaysian Plover–all from that single point.”

David and Will also encountered Jon Dunn and the WINGS Coast to Highlands group.  “Lucky Jon,” they’d taken to calling him: the first bird Jon  looked at on getting out of the the van was a Spoon-billed Sandpiper!

What is the commonest sandpiper in North America?

Not all scolopacids are called “sandpiper,” and some of them don’t pipe sand at all. The commonest sandpiper in North America, for example, spends most of its time lurking in dark forests, where it is rarely seen except when it emerges for a twilight twirl around its aerial dance floor.

According to the figures cited in The Shorebird Guide, American Woodcock has a North American (and thus a global) population of about 5,000,000 birds; Semipalmated and Western Sandpipers–had I not known the answer, I might have guessed one of those species myself–each tally about 4,000,000 individuals.

Right now is the time to get out and listen for the evening twitterings of woodcock throughout the species’ breeding range. Participants in Paul Lehman’s March tour of Nebraska will probably be the first WINGS group to witness the sky dance this year, but any trip to the eastern half of the US or southern Canada has a good chance of encountering this secretive and startlingly abundant sandpiper.

Our friend Robert Straub writes from Xalapa, Veracruz:

On behalf of the members and officers of the Club de Observadores de Aves de Xalapa, thanks very much to you and to WINGS for the generous donation made in October 2009 after the ABA Conference in Xalapa.

We’ll be using the largest part of the funds to support a community group in Oaxaca that is protecting and monitoring a breeding colony of Military Macaws. They’ll be using the funds to help purchase a spotting scope and tripod, necessary tools for their work.

The macaw site is near Tecomovaca, Oaxaca, about 100 km northeast of Oaxaca City and about 75 km southeast of Tehuacan, Puebla. The group is from a town on the southern edge of the canyon, and the volunteers walk a long way to their observation sites, where they monitor the macaws and make sure they are safe from people who are hoping to illegally capture and sell a bird. We know the site, and can confirm that the work is hard and the conditions are rough.

This group, and another on the north side, are doing good work. In addition to protecting the birds from hunters, they work with biologists and ornithologists and are developing tourism programs to assist their communities economically. Their guiding hope is to educate visitors to respect and protect these wonderful birds.

And the COAX connection? Each year we organize a field trip to see the nesting macaws in the wonderful landscapes of this very impressive canyon. The walls of the canyon are nearly vertical, and in places probably a sheer 1,000 feet above the creek below, where the macaws nest in small cracks and holes in the canyon walls. We camp in cabins at the base of the canyon, then set out at about 4:00 am, in the dark, so that we can be on top at sunrise.

Our arrival is greeted by the loud calls of the macaws reverberating off the canyon walls as they leave, often in pairs, to feed for the morning; a few hours later we watch them return to feed their young. One year we were able to watch a fledgling macaw tentatively perch outside its nest, thinking of making its inaugural flight. This was perhaps its first venture outside of the nest, and we watched the bird on its very narrow perch, with 1,000 feet to the creek below, but it couldn’t work up the nerve to take off on that day!

A young Military Macaw perches tenuously outside its nest while its parent looks on. Photo: Robert Straub / COAX.

WINGS is delighted to have helped a local community protect its natural heritage. It’s thanks only to the efforts of conservationists and scientists “on the ground” that we still have birds to see….