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Tracking Peeps

About 70 Western Sandpipers will be taking something extra with them when they start their northward migration this spring - tiny radio transmitters glued to their backs. Researchers hope the one-gram devices will yield new data about the birds' migration strategies and the sites they use along the Pacific Flyway. Although the birds are among the most common shorebirds - estimates for their total numbers range between 1.2 and 6 million - scientists understand little about their movement and habits.

They will tag 30 birds from San Francisco Bay (the other 40 will be from Grace Harbor, Washington, and Honey Lake, California, in the Great Basin). Researchers in airplanes will track them to nesting spots in Western Alaska, noting how long the birds spend at each stopover point. Fifteen agencies, including U.S. Fish & Wildlife and the Estuary Project, are cooperating on the $120,000, two-year project. Mary Ann Bishop of Alaska's Copper River Institute and Nils Warnock of the University of Nevada are the principal investigators.

Up to 500,000 of the gregarious, six- to seven-inch-long "peeps" inhabit the Bay during the peak spring season in late April. Some birds winter here; others stop by as they migrate to and from Central America. They feed in the mudflats at low tide and frequently roost in the Bay's salt ponds and other marshlands.

This tendency of the birds to congregate in large numbers makes it especially critical to learn about their migration patterns, because destruction of any of their major stopovers could impact hundreds of thousands of birds, says Bishop. Nobody knows how long individual birds spend at any one site, nor do they know if they follow a regular annual route from one resting place to the next.

"I think it's important to keep an eye on species that are abundant," adds Warnock. "If something goes wrong with these birds, then very likely something is going wrong with other species as well."

Contact: Mary Anne Bishop (907)424-7212; Nils Warnock (702)786-4535

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