The Narrow Edge by Deborah Cramer

Author:Deborah Cramer [Cramer, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300185195
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ten

DOES LOSING ONE MORE BIRD MATTER?

The knot ghost trail from Texas up through the Great Plains, once populated but now rarely used and fading from memory, is disquieting. What might it mean if knots, whose numbers have already declined substantially, are lost from the edge of the sea?

Each spring in my backyard, when the ground is still bare and brown, a shorebird calls for a mate. A brook runs along the meadow, freshwater lacking a sandy shore, too far upstream to feel the tide. When dusk falls and a few stars appear and other birds cease to sing, we would hear the call of woodcocks—shorebirds that evolved with sandpipers but left the open beach for a life inland. I rarely saw these reclusive, well-hidden birds on the ground: their low, nasal peent, peent, peent located them. After calling for a minute or two, a male would take off—once within a few feet of where I was standing, coming directly toward me, a surprise, I think, to both of us. He’d then shoot into the sky, spiraling beyond the tree line, out of sight. A fluttering sound—air rushing through his tail feathers—signaled his return. He executed careening barrel rolls and loops, accompanied by melodious warbling, before dropping precipitously to the darkened ground, camouflaged in the dead leaves. Peent, peent, peent! He’d safely landed. He repeated his aerial dance a bit later each evening as the days grew longer.

What of this decidedly not-of-the-shore shorebird? Over the years our singing field grew quieter, down to one woodcock barreling his way through the sky, performing for a female I hoped was waiting in the darkness. It didn’t take much to send the others away. Two new houses and their resident dogs, running and barking in the field, interrupted the nuptial displays. Now, in early summer evenings, I either listen for the lone bird, walk down the road where flights are still going strong, or drive across town to the seine field, where fishermen once mended and dried their nets by day and woodcock still sing in the evenings. Their disappearance from our meadow, though sad, isn’t particularly significant in the overall well-being of woodcock: feeling pinched, perhaps they had better choices. In the United States, loss of young forest led to population declines in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the past 15 years their numbers have held steady.

The same can’t be said for their sand-loving cousins. Each lineage of knot is declining. Ruddy turnstones along the East Coast of North America have dropped by 75 percent since 1974. Along the East Coast of North and South America there are fewer semipalmated sandpipers: fewer in Delaware Bay; fewer in southern Ontario and in the great tidal flats of the Bay of Fundy, where they double their weight on tiny amphipods scavenging in the mud before heading south; fewer in their winter homes in the Guianas, where their numbers have dropped dramatically—79 percent since the 1980s; and no more breeding birds in Churchill, Manitoba, on

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