You can help!
Anyone visiting beaches or other intertidal areas can help us with our research. You simply need to be able to recognise sanderlings, count them, and possess a pair of binoculars, or preferably a telescope with zoom objective. A notebook and pencil or pen are needed too. If you have observed sanderlings, please report the following:
It would be especially helpful if you were able to also report the following:
- Date
- Location
- Time
- Number of sanderlings
It would be especially helpful if you were able to also report the following:
- The number of colour-ringed individuals you observed (the absence of colour-ringed birds is useful information for us too!)
- The colour combination of the observed colour-ringed sanderlings. General help on reporting resightings is available here and on reporting sanderling resightings here
- The number of birds that you checked (one by one) for colour-rings (usually less than the total birds counted because it is often difficult to inspect the legs for rings of all sanderlings present)
- The number of adult and juvenile birds. How to discriminate adults and juveniles in the field is explained here.
- Any information about behaviour (how many birds were doing what?)
Why are we interested in this?
The number of colour-ringed birds in a total group is an interesting measure because the “colour-ring density” tells us about the total size of the population. For example, assuming a random mixing of colour-ringed sanderlings into the population, if 1,500 sanderlings have been ringed and presumed to be still alive (based on our survival studies) and the average colour-ring density is one bird colour-ringed on every 50 birds checked, the total population size would be 1,500 x 50 = 75,000.We are interested in the fraction of juvenile birds, because it will tell us about the productivity of sanderlings each year. Productivity and survival together determine population size. Both measures are however often difficult to get but essential if we want to know how our wader populations are doing.
