Red Knots

“Reds knots spend most of their time at the extreme latitudes of the Western Hemisphere, two areas that are expected to show effects from climate change most rapidly. Gregory Breese, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's project leader for the Delaware Bay Estuary Project, said that models indicate a relationship between snow cover in the Arctic and bird survival. In addition, red knot biologists have observed that the birds are arriving one week later to winter in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago off South America, than they were a decade ago. In Delaware Bay, warming waters and increased variation in weather, including more frequent and intense storm events, could throw off the delicate balance between the horseshoe crabs and red knots.”

The Red Knot... “migration is fueled by an ancient synchronicity — the spawning of billions of tiny green horseshoe crab eggs just as the knots and their prodigious appetites arrive — that is now threatened. Largely because of the overfishing of horseshoe crabs... wildlife biologists in New Jersey worry that without stronger protections, they could vanish. But that depends on the crabs.

Since the 1980s, the rufa subspecies of red knot that depends on Delaware Bay has declined dramatically from a population of more than 90,000 to 150,000 birds to between 15,000 and 20,000, according to Kevin Kalasz, the Shorebird Project Coordinator for the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife. The population numbers have been steady since 2003, Kalasz said.

“Excessive shooting, both in spring and fall reduced this species to a pitiful remnant of its former numbers; but spring shooting was stopped before it was too late and afterwards this bird was wisely taken off the list of game birds; it has increased slowly since then, but is far from abundant now.”

“It is not my intention to convey the impression that the Knots are nearly exterminated, but they are much reduced in numbers, and are in great danger of extinction, and comparatively few can now be seen in Massachusetts, where formerly there were twenty to twenty-five thousand a year, which I consider a reasonable estimate of its former abundance.”

Prior to 1850, red knots were more numerous in parts of Cape Cod “than in all the rest of New England combined, and being very gregarious they would collect in those places in exceedingly large numbers, estimates of which were useless…immense numbers of these birds could be seen, as they rose up in clouds…”

“English immigrants missed their little robin redbreast so much that when they came here [North America] they named just about every bird with even a tinge of red or russet a robin... They called two reddish sandpipers, the dowitcher and the Red Knot, robin snipes, and the Red-breasted Merganser the sea robin.