The Red Knot Survival Project
The Red Knot is in trouble, dangerously close to dying out. That's the bad news.
The good news is that people are paying attention, finally, and are denying the inevitability of that extinction. We might be able to do something about it.
When a Red Knot (Calidris canutus rufa) lives thirteen years, it will have flown enough miles to carry it to the moon, an incredible feat.
This bird hatches into life in June on the Arctic Tundra, and it then embarks on a recurring sequence of seasonal flights that carry it to some of the most southerly reaches of Argentina, then back to the Arctic to breed in the spring. At every stop along their 9,300-mile migratory journeys they depend on feeding intensively at specific locations to acquire the fat reserves they burn off on the next long flight.
If the food no longer exists in the place the birds have come to expect it, they are in trouble. Because of commercial over-harvesting at Delaware Bay, the horseshoe crabs which collect there to spawn every May and June are not producing enough eggs for the birds to put on the weight they need to fuel the next flight of the cycle.
The Red Knot Survival Project, a program at Global Conservation Alliance (GCA), is directed specifically at righting this imbalance.