The migration of Red Knots through Porsangerfjord in spring 2005: a progress report on the Norwegian Knot Project

We report the results for 2005 of the Norwegian Knot Project, a three-year project to study the spring stopover of Red Knots in Porsangerfjord, N Norway. The peak count was 34,000, but  allowing for local movements and turnover we estimate that a total of 38,000 knots staged in 2005. Three thousand five hundred and ninety-six were seen departing in an N-NW direction suggesting that they were the islandica subspecies heading for breeding grounds in Greenland and NE Canada. Sightings of individually colour-marked knots indicate that a substantial proportion of the stopover population are islandica that winter in the Wadden Sea. Although two colour-marked birds from the main canutus wintering grounds in W Africa had been seen at Porsangerfjord in 2004, there was no evidence that such birds occurred in 2005.