CWF’s Larry Niles is in Northern Canada searching for Red Knots and other shorebirds in their Arctic breeding territory. We are following him and posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

Our small camp. The cold weather and frigid rain confined us to our tents on the second-to-last day of our trip.

Our second-to-last day in the Arctic was rained out. A constant cold drizzle punctuated by brief downpours confined us to our tents, as the limited visibility would have made it impossible to spot Red Knots or their nests – or approaching polar bears.

We saw our first (and last) polar bear on the final day of the trip. When it saw us coming his way, he slowly lumbered off in the opposite direction, posing no threat.

But on our last day on Knot Plateau, we woke to a brilliant sunny day. While Rick, Steve, and Mandy broke camp, Josh, Mark, and I drove our ATVs out to the two knot nests we had found two days prior. As we had only banded one parent at each nest, we were hoping to find the unbanded birds this time. But the newly hatched knots and their parents had already left for the nearest wetland, and the incubating bird on the second nest was the bird already tagged with a geolocator. With nothing more to be done, we made our way back to camp to help finish packing.

A knot incubates her eggs on a small patch of vegetation.

It took two days to return to Coral Harbour and civilization. After staying the night with Josh and his family, we will begin our two-day journey by commercial flight back to Newark, anticipating the shift from 45 degrees to 95 degrees, but glad to be coming home.

The expedition was a success simply because we are all coming home safe and sound. But it was also a complete success because we achieved all of our primary goals. First, we established the presence of a new Red Knot breeding area from the ground. Second, we found a significant number of knots compared to our previous study sites on both Southampton and King William Islands, where most of the knot population had disappeared after the rapid decline in stopovers like Delaware Bay. Third, we finished the fieldwork needed to complete our range-wide mapping of rufa knot breeding habitat, which will help future investigations into Red Knot ecology. And finally, we attached the first geolocators to knots in the Canadian Arctic and set a firm foundation for a more successful effort in the future.

Our team. Back row, L to R: Larry Niles and Mandy Dey. Front row, L to R: Mark Peck, Joshua Keenainak, Steve Gates, and Rick Lathrop.

We are grateful to many people. The expedition would have been impossible without the support of Paul Smith of the Canadian Wildlife Service. The Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ, the Canadian Wildlife Service, Rutgers University, the Royal Ontario Museum, and The Steve Gates and Julie Fox Foundation all supported the expedition. The Coral Harbour Hunters and Trappers Organization provided essential support. Bruce McKitrick helped us with supplies. Finally we thank Joshua, Suzy, and their family for their hospitality. This expedition was only successful because of all of you.

For the full blog entries, see Larry’s posts: Arctic Rain, Our Last Day, and Summing Up Our 2013 Arctic Expedition.

CWF’s Larry Niles is in Northern Canada searching for Red Knots and other shorebirds in their Arctic breeding territory. We are following him and posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

The first nest we found had one hatched chick, so fresh you can still see the embryonic material in the shell.

The second nest we found was on the side of an almost completely barren hill.

After 10 days in the field, 5 of them searching for knots, and with only one day before we must leave, we have at long last found knot nests – two, in fact. As we suspected, both still contained eggs, although one adult was also brooding a chick that was only hours old. Also as we suspected, we found them on small ridges in gravel-sized frost-cracked rock with very sparse vegetation.

Mark sets the trap to catch the nesting adult knot. The trap falls when the bird sits on a small line across the nest.

There are fewer knots than the number of potential knot nesting sites in our study area, meaning the knots have two possible strategies when they choose a nesting site: they could be fanning out at very low densities, or they could be clustering and keeping a certain distance apart. Our experience at our first red knot study site suggested the latter possibility. In the first few years, when knot populations were still fairly high, knots occurred along ridges one kilometer apart. This fell apart as the number of knots collapsed in the period between 1999 to 2006, but our experience suggested knots will stay together and keep territories of about one square kilometer. In other words, knots like their space, but they still want neighbors.

So after finding the first nest, we started searching about 1 km away in adjacent habitat and soon found a second nest, corroborating our theory. But by then it was close to the end of the day and we had only an hour or so to search for a third. Finding none, we rode the 4 miles of hard trail back to camp with some satisfaction. We will try again tomorrow to find more in the area, but unfortunately it will be our last day.

A geolocator, about to be attached to a knot

Rain is falling against our tent, as it has through most of the night. Rain in the Arctic is always cold – more of a winter rain than one of summer. The knot nest with one chick will almost certainly have four by now, as it usually only takes 24 hours for all eggs to hatch. The adult will brood the chicks as best he can, but it’s not unusual for weather such as this to kill young shorebirds. This is one of many reasons why northbound stopovers like Delaware Bay must provide shorebirds with a good start every year.

Rick released the knots at their nests.

If the rain abates, we will continue searching for nests tomorrow, but only time will tell whether our final day in the field will be a washout. Regardless, it is a wonderful feeling to have finally found what we came searching for.

For the full blog entry, see Larry’s post here.

Stay tuned for further updates!

CWF’s Larry Niles is in Northern Canada searching for Red Knots and other shorebirds in their Arctic breeding territory. We are following him as he reports from the field. The following is a summary of his latest blog posts.

Our camp along the Sutton River.

It has been a grueling, but exhilarating, last few days for our team. At long last, we’ve reached our study site. Anyone else would have looked at this barren plateau and wondered what all the fuss was about, but our team fist-bumped with pride. After three tries, we had finally made it – but getting here was an arduous process we won’t soon forget.

Once into the formidable wetland of the Sutton River, our machines frequently sank up to the axles in mud. And all the while, we had to keep watch for bears.

We left Coral Harbour on Wednesday afternoon with three ATVs and a truck, as well as a new team member. Josh is our “bear-watcher,” an experienced Inuit hunter whose job is to discourage or, if absolutely necessary, kill an attacking polar bear. We can only hope his services will not be required.

Rick Lathrop uses both topographic maps and satellite imagery to help guide us through this tundra wilderness. Next to Rick, our 3 ATVs are packed with 10 days’ worth of supplies for 6 people.

We had hoped that the road out of town, which was recently extended, might take us all the way to our study site – but it was not to be. Four hours after leaving Coral Harbour, we reached a point where we had to depart from the road and traverse out into the roadless tundra.

We set out by ATV the next morning, but soon ran into trouble. To get to the knot plateau, we had to cross the Sutton River, one of Southampton Island’s major rivers. It’s a gentle stream where it crosses the road, but at the place where we needed to cross it was a wide valley, within which lay one of the most formidable wetlands in the Arctic. The ground shook like Jell-O as we walked, and if an ATV so much as scratched the surface it was down to its axles. After five hours, we had to give up.

Making one of four attempts to cross the Sutton River.

At Josh’s suggestion, the next day we travelled about 15 miles downriver to a crossing used by Inuit hunters. The river was wider there, but we were optimistic because the riverbank was high ground, so we could drive up or downriver over easily-traversed terrain. But after four attempts with the ATV, we could see the river was too deep to cross. The knot plateau was within sight on the other side, but for a second time we had to drive away.

After several days of trying to cross the treacherous Sutton River, we were spent.

Finally, Rick found an almost entirely dry ridge of high ground about three miles to the west of our camp. After crossing the Sutton River near its headwaters, it was five hours of rough riding with fully-loaded ATVs along the ridge to get back to the knot plateau. When the plateau finally rose up before us, we were elated. We drove six more miles before finally setting camp along one of the many lakes in the complex.

Thankfully, water is not an issue. One of the joys in the Arctic is the clear ice melt water almost everywhere. Here, Mark collects water from the Sutton in an Arctic sunset.

The big question we will answer tomorrow is: do knots still use this area? In 1999, there were at least four times as many knots as there were three years ago, following the collapse of the Delaware Bay horseshoe crab population. Knots have disappeared entirely from many areas of the Arctic – are they still here? We shall find out tomorrow.

For the original blog entries, see Larry’s posts: Polar Bears and Roadless Tundra, On to the Land, River Crossings, and Third Time’s a Charm.

Stay tuned for further updates!

CWF’s Larry Niles is in Northern Canada searching for Red Knots and other shorebirds in their Arctic breeding territory. We are following him and posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

A Semipalmated Sandpiper nesting in wetland tundra on Southampton Island.

While flying from Winnipeg to Nunavut, we focused on a strategy for finding red knot nests and adults with broods. We know from our 9 years of Arctic work that knots don’t occur randomly across the tundra landscape. Quite the opposite, they choose very specific places that distinguish knots from other Arctic nesting shorebirds.

Eskers and frozen wetlands are typical knot nesting habitat on Southampton Island. In only a few weeks, the snow will be mostly gone and the wetlands will produce insect forage for knots.

Most knots choose to nest in relatively barren tundra slightly higher in elevation than more common Arctic nesting shorebirds. The latter prefer the lush wetland tundra along the coast and in the bigger river drainages because of the abundant prey early in the season. So why are knots drawn to colder and more barren places? We suspect they rely on the more persistent snow cover to discourage predation while they lie low in small patches of snow-free patches. Most predators prefer the lush areas with relatively dense shorebird nests. By the time the knot young hatch and are ready to feed, the protective snow barrier melts and the adults take their brood to the surrounding defrosted wetlands. By then shorebird prey are abundant.

So we suspect that at this point in the nesting season, we will find eggs just starting to hatch and soon the adults will lead their young to the nearby wetlands. Rick Lathrop, head of the Rutgers University Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis (CRSSA), has prepared mapping that will help us find prospective nest sites with the following characteristics:

1. Areas with less than 5% vegetation (We will especially be looking for eskers, or sinuous frost-cracked rocky ridges that snake through the best knots habitats.)
2. Numerous nearby patches of wetlands or small lakes with interconnecting streams
3. Areas of slightly higher elevation that stay snowy longer into the season

Map prepared by Rick Lathrop of CRSSA lab at Rutgers, indicating prime areas to search for knots and their broods.

We have several targets but we are not certain that we can get to them. We hope to drive into the interior areas of Southampton on a new road built to help residents access new fishing sites. We want to take a truck as far as possible to carry our supplies and equipment. At the road end we will still have to move everything with ATVs to the areas of greatest probability, which are likely to be about 10-20 miles off the new road. It’s hard to plan.

But the rewards are great. If we are successful we will be able to study red knot for the first time without the need of being flown in to a remote place at great expense. We shall see.

For the original blog entry, see Larry’s post here.

Stay tuned for further updates!