Category: Shorebirds

CWF’s Larry Niles and his colleagues are on a two-week trip to northern Brazil to trap and band Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, and other shorebirds on their wintering grounds. We’ll be posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

After several days of trapping efforts on the mainland, we took the hour-long boat trip to Curupu, an island just off the coast of Panaquatira. Our trapping work here last year went off almost without a hitch, and we were off the island in less than 24 hours. So when we arrived this year, we naively expected this year’s expedition to go just as easily.

It didn’t. Instead, we suffered three days and two nights of oven-like tropical heat while being blasted by fine wind-driven sand and fighting the tides to catch birds. We slept with the tents sealed to protect us from the blowing sand, but this left us wet with sweat every morning. Mosquitoes met us in droves as we emerged from our tents before dawn light to set the cannon net. Sudden downpours chilled us to the bone, while the blazing sun that followed fried us.

On the morning of our last day, the team endured several of these drenching rainstorms while resetting the net twice, following the retreating tide line. But our perseverance finally paid off. After three days of frustration, we were finally able to make a small catch. The eight red knots (compared to a catch of 115 last year) were fitted with new geolocators and set free to join the rest of the flock. After our short-lived deprivations, we hoped to be free of Curupu.

Not quite. We had hoped that we could leave by midday, but transporting our equipment to the boat landing was delayed by yet another downpour. When we finally made it to the landing, we found that we couldn’t leave until an incoming tide. We were facing the possibility of another night on the island.

Expecting only tribulation, we were suddenly met with kindness. Indio Sousa, the father of a Brazilian student who joined us for our misadventure, and who manages a compound of houses on the island, invited us to stay in the guest quarters. While we luxuriated in what felt like our first shower in months, he served us platters of watermelon and pineapple and cooked a plate of shrimp, then fish. As we enjoyed his generosity, we relaxed in the languid late afternoon tropical heat, cooled by gentle breezes, while being serenaded by the melodious song of native forest birds and amphibians.

The overnight provided us with more than cool air. It also provided a last chance to trap, this time for willets. We had brought 30 geolocators to attach to these poorly understood temperate breeders, one of only three shorebirds that breed in New Jersey, and an emblematic species of the breeders of Delaware Bay.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. The operation needed precise timing, an unlikely event in our short-lived experience in northern Brazil, especially given our bad fortune. The captain of the small boat that brought us to this island came late, then ran out of gas while taking us to the catch site. Finally arriving at the roost that we scouted at the start of the trip, we faced an already declining tide. We tried to catch, but the island defeated us one final time.

But back on the mainland, we were once again blessed with kindness. As we fled to our home base, the parents of another Brazilian student on our team graciously offered a home-cooked meal, a very generous offer considering the size of our group and their own modest means. We left their home with full stomachs, warmed hearts, and mixed feelings about the wild coast of Brazil.

For the original blog entries, see Larry’s posts Curupu: Kindness and Grim Deprivation and Maranhão Lost and Found.

CWF’s Larry Niles and his colleagues are on a two-week trip to northern Brazil to trap and band Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, and other shorebirds on their wintering grounds. We’ll be posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

Cannon netting in a remote place increases the odds of failure, and cannon netting in Brazil may be the most difficult of all. For one thing, cannon netting requires an enormous amount of equipment not easily available in places like northern Brazil. Take covering material, the opaque cloth that is widely available in the US to shade hothouses. We use it to shade the birds caught under a net to protect them from the sun and to calm them. After visiting many stores, we found something similar in São Luís, not equal to the need, but sufficiently suitable to be useful.

But for the igniters we use to fire the cannons, it’s a much different story. Even in the United States, the authorities tightly control their use for obvious reasons. Igniters are what miners use to blow up rock, and thus potentially dangerous in the wrong hands. As far as we know, they cannot be found in Brazil, and we can’t even receive them if we sent them from the US. Only a government official can do that, and our colleagues in Brazil were unable to get permission to do it.

We overcame this nearly insurmountable difficulty by going to the Internet. We soon learned how to create an igniter with small Christmas tree lights. Cut the glass top off of the light and charge with a minor electric current, and they pop like the real thing.

Worse yet is gunpowder. We use it to fire the projectiles that carry the net over the birds. Without it, we have no expedition. But in the South American countries in which we have worked, the authorities tightly control gunpowder. Here in Brazil you need a license, and forget about getting one if you are from the United States.

But we persisted, and after a bit of investigation, we learned that Brazilians use black powder in religious ceremonies. We would eventually find powder in, of all places, a religious goods store with a mix of religious iconography impossible to find in the US. Think Blessed Virgin Mary meets voodoo goat head devil god. As if blessed by the Holy Mother, we found all the powder we needed just beneath her benevolent and loving image.

In other words, to be successful in a cannon netting expedition, one must be resourceful. Ultimately it depends on two things: the team and the people in country that help you. This year in Brazil we are fortunate on both counts. Our Brazilian colleague, Ana Paula Sousa, is from the Universidad Federal de Maranhão and lives in São José de Ribamar, only five miles from our field station. We work under her banding permit and with her professor, Dr. Augusto Rodrigues. It was her that provided us with the field station we call home.

Ana’s generous nature comes naturally. Her father and mother Omar and Diva Sousa have been vital to overcoming the minor obstacles that seem to arise everyday when running an expedition in a rural area, from fixing the cranky generator and well pump to finding hard to find supplies like net-mending line and block ice. All this, and yet Mr. and Mrs. Sousa refuse our offers of compensation for their time. They do it because of their pride for their daughter’s chosen vocation, the native spirit of generosity, and their own big hearts.

 

For the original blog entry, see Larry’s post Down to Work.

Stay tuned for further updates!

CWF’s Larry Niles and his colleagues are on a two-week trip to northern Brazil to trap and band Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, and other shorebirds on their wintering grounds. We’ll be following him and posting summaries of his blog entries as he reports from the field.

 

When most people think of Brazil, they think of Rio de Janeiro, a modern city that will soon host both the World Cup and the Summer Olympics. Or they may think of the Amazon jungle, and all the wonders of a wilderness alive with fascinating wildlife and plants that can found in no other place.

Except for an eight-hour layover in Rio, we are not going to these places. Instead, our home for the next two weeks will be Panaquatira, a tiny town on the northern coast about 250 miles east of the mouth of the Amazon. You could not imagine a more coastal town – the main street is the beach. Residents ride the mile-long strand to get to their modest homes in all but lunar tides, when the sea laps onto the stone driveways. The town is a resort for the working class, who mostly stay for the day, often arriving by bus to enjoy a frolic on the wave-washed sandy beach.

But we have not come to recreate. Our team of nine hearty souls will attempt to capture shorebirds that breed in the Arctic and winter here in the Maranhão state of Brazil. This forlorn and remote shoreline supports one of the most important concentrations of shorebirds in the hemisphere. Each year, thousands of red knots, ruddy turnstones, black-bellied plovers, whimbrels, and other species spend the winter here in a hot and humid climate that is the exact opposite of Arctic weather. Why do they winter here? What attracts them to this place? Where the Arctic do they breed? What other places are vital to their enigmatic lives? These are some of the questions we hope to answer.

Last year we trapped the beaches of Panaquatira and nearby island of Curupu. We caught red knots and ruddy turnstones with cannon nets and banded them with tiny devices called geolocators that track movement and store daily locations on a tiny memory chip. Geolocators are a digital treasure chest, but they can only be unlocked if we recapture the same birds and retrieve the devices.

Working in this remote place at the center of the world creates a challenge. What we call necessities are luxuries here, only available to a lucky elite. Everyone else struggles to achieve modest livelihoods at best. It’s a place where basic sanitation and clean water are still a modern improvement not yet available to the majority of the population; a place where warm-hearted and generous people must face persistent lawlessness, both in the street and in the halls of power. I fear the water, the parasites, and the thievery that the residents suffer with equanimity.

Don’t get me wrong. I live in New Jersey, less than an hour from Camden – one of the poorest places in the country and one of the “murder capitals” of the US. Still, we are threading a needle here. We don’t come as tourists, or on business per se. Panaquatira will be our home, and we must pull together a complicated effort that can only be successful with help and generosity of the residents. In return we hope to shed light on the circumstances of the birds and people of this wild and isolated place.

 

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

Stay tuned for further updates!