Written by Gyorgy Szimuly/WorldWaders
The migration period attracts more and more birdwatchers to go out and find rarities while others are counting birds for conservation purposes. While many people thinks shorebirds are mainly occurring along beaches and sea coastlines thousands of birds are crossing the continent in every part of the world. What numbers they are present compared to the shoreline migrants? Are those numbers large enough to identify important shorebird sites? Do we need to ensure the availability of suitable foraging habitats as large numbers are passing by both during southbound and northbound migration? To answer those questions we need to ensure we have data of passing shorebirds from various parts of the flyways.
Migrating/wintering Kentish Plovers and Dunlins in Montenegro. © Gyorgy Szimuly
Monitoring waterbird populations are popular acorss the globe. The expanding number of users of WorldWaders do it any differently. Starting from the fall migration of 2010 we launch a long term counting project for getting answers to the question mentioned above. The objectives of the subproject is as follows.
- Picturing the numbers of continent crossing waders both during southbound and northbound migration.
- Identifying unidentified key habitats used by waders during migration.
- Ensuring constantly available stop-over site network for waders based on data.
- Popularising wader monitoring.
To meet these target organised counts will be carried out in various parts of the world on every second week-end beginning of 1 August 2010. The following dates set for the period of 2010 fall migration:
01.08.2010
15.08.2010
29.08.2010
12.09.2010
26.09.2010
10.10.2010
24.10.2010
07.11.2010
21.11.2010
05.12.2010
19.12.2010
Participants on these dates will count waders (means Charadriiformes excluding gulls, terns and allies) and data will be entered to the Non-breeding Shorebird Mapping Project module on www.worldwaders.rog.
I am encouraging you to join this subproject and make counts on your easily accessible or frequently visited site(s). Please drop a line if you can join this project and fine with counting in every second week-end.