When you count the number of Redshank on your local estuary and discover that there are fewer now than there were last year – or five, or twenty years ago – what are the implications? Is this part of a national or international trend or has something changed within the estuary itself?
The first question to ask is, ‘what is happening elsewhere?’ and then to wonder about the ways in which numbers of birds in different sites might relate to each other. What actually happens to local counts when national counts go down – or go up, for that matter?
The UK Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS) data provide comprehensive and long-term monitoring of estuarine wader populations around our coastline. Thanks to volunteers who collect monthly counts each year, these data present an excellent opportunity to explore how bird distributions can change over time. A 2017 paper by Verónica Méndez and colleagues from the University of East Anglia and British Trust for Ornithology uses counts of 19 species (18 waders plus Shelduck, an honorary wader) over a 26-year period to ask what happens to distribution and local abundance across our estuaries when overall population sizes go up or down.
The counters
A WeBS count can be a tough assignment for a volunteer birdwatcher. Being allocated to a stretch of an estuarine coastline and asked to visit it, whatever the weather, on a given weekend of every month, in every winter, is not the same as an invitation to go birdwatching in September to look for a Curlew Sandpiper.
The counts used in this paper are from the months of November through to February, when waders are largely settled for the winter and the weather can be less than clement. Many of the data-points for individual sites have been collected by the same person in all of the years analysed in the paper and every contribution is important.
WeBS is the successor of other, similar count schemes which celebrated 70 years of continuous monitoring in 2017/18. It is organised by BTO, in partnership with RSPB and JNCC and in association with WWT. There are over 3000 registered WeBS volunteers, collecting data about the waterbirds that can be found on estuaries, in wetlands, on inland lakes, along river valleys and in local parks and villages.
Two other WaderTales blogs reflect on changing population estimates of wader species in Great Britain and in the island of Ireland.
Understanding change
Many populations of migratory birds are changing in number quite rapidly at present, but are these changes more likely to result in changes in occupancy (eg colonisation of or extinction from some sites) or changes in abundance within sites? Put simply, if extra waders arrive in the autumn, how do they distribute themselves across available sites? If fewer arrive, where will the gaps be found?
The contrasting fortunes of Dunlin and Black-tailed Godwit over the period covered in the new paper
Over the period studied in the paper (between 1980-85 and 2002-07), populations of five species declined, with the greatest losses occurring in Purple Sandpiper and Shelduck (both declined by about 25%), while there were increases for four, the biggest of which were Avocet (+1690%), Golden Plover (+554%) and Black-tailed Godwit (+418%). No birdwatcher will be shocked by the figures for Avocet or Black-tailed Godwit, wintering numbers of which have shot up, but Golden Plover is more of a surprise and may be linked to a move from inland fields to estuaries.
When the size of a wintering population of waders declined, Verónica Méndez and her colleagues found that the main consequence was a reduction in numbers across all sites. Birds were likely to stay on a site even if local numbers were dwindling. This suggests high levels of site-fidelity by individual waders, which is something we know from ringing and tracking studies. If you’re still alive then just do the same again – there could be a better site with a higher number of conspecifics somewhere else but it would be risky to try to find that out.
Thirty years ago, few people can have expected that they would ever see such a large flock of Avocets on the Humber
If the size of a wintering population increased, generally numbers went up within all occupied sites. The exceptions tended to occur in species for which original numbers were very small, such as for Greenshank, or species for which the change in numbers has been rapid – as seen in Avocet and Black-tailed Godwit.
If adults don’t change their wintering sites then increases are presumably being driven by juveniles. Their settlement decisions may be influenced by the distribution of adults of the same species, resulting in increased local abundance, rather than colonisation of new sites. For the two rapidly-expanding species, Black-tailed Godwit and Avocet, there was colonisation of 25 and 15 new sites, respectively, between 1980-85 and 2002-07, with some indication of more similar increases in sites that were closer together, which may reflect local movements among groups of nearby sites.
Designating sites
Juvenile waders may well settle in areas where there are already populations of wintering adults
One of the key conservation measures for waders across Europe is the Special Protection Area (SPA) network, a collection of sites that are designated because they hold internationally or nationally important numbers of species, measured as a percentage of the population. Designated sites need to maintain numbers of all the species that hit this threshold percentage. However, if a national or European population gets larger (for example because of high breeding success) but the number on a particular site does not grow (or grows more slowly), then the species might drop below the threshold for protection, even if the site is unchanged. Theoretically this could affect a site’s protected status for that species, although is unlikely to be a problem, as most sites are designated for many species.
This new paper shows that gains and losses tend to be fairly constant across all sites, making it unlikely that a site designation would be affected by national or European-scale changes. In only one species (Ringed Plover), have numbers declined so much in some sites that the total number of sites exceeding the threshold for that species has decreased.
Keep counting!
Habitat availability and site fidelity, along with species longevity, may explain the strong tendency for local population abundance to change much more than site occupancy, in our wintering waders. Given the statutory importance of maintaining waterbird populations in designated protected areas, it is important to continue local and national surveys that can identify changes in local abundance and relate these to large-scale processes.
Returning to the earlier question – When you count the number of Redshank on your local estuary and discover that there are fewer now than there were last year – or five, or twenty years ago – what are the implications?
This new paper shows that it is unlikely that a local drop in a species’ numbers is caused by a redistribution of birds. Factors that might lie behind a local decline need to be investigated locally, if the trend is not replicated elsewhere. The authors could only reach this conclusion because they had 26 years of WeBS data from a range of sites at their disposal. Future generations of WeBS counters will hopefully continue to monitor the conditions of our estuaries, working together throughout the country to interpret local counts within a national framework.
Paper
WaderTales blogs are written by Graham Appleton, to celebrate waders and wader research. Many of the articles are based on previously published papers, with the aim of making wader science available to a broader audience.
The Grey Plover may be grey in the winter but in its summer plumage the American name of Black-bellied Plover is far more appropriate. Each spring, adults moult into this breeding finery but what happens to first-years, are there differences between the sexes and are Grey Plovers ‘typical’ of the wader family as a whole?
For an adult wader, the post-breeding moult is complete. The photograph alongside shows an adult bird in full winter-plumage; the picture is from Norfolk (UK) but the same photograph could have been taken in South Africa, India, Australia or South America, so global is the Grey Plover’s distribution. The bird has discarded all of the breeding plumage it acquired in the spring, and the flight feathers that were a year old. All of the coverts of the wing have been moulted and have a uniform appearance, and look at the fresh-edged tertials that fold neatly over the dark (almost black) tips of the primaries.
The next photograph shows a first-winter juvenile, newly arrived from the breeding grounds. This bird is a Black-bellied Plover in Florida. Having started life as a tiny, downy chick, it will have acquired this new set of feathers before migration. The spangling of the back is diagnostic of a juvenile Grey Plover but the golden spots can confuse a novice wader-handler, who might want to turn it into one of the golden plover family. Before winter starts, new non-breeding-type body feathers moult in, so the bird loses the spangling of the upper parts and a lot of the streaking of the under-parts.
It is not thought that one-year-old Grey Plovers breed in their first summer, with most staying on their ‘wintering’ grounds for well over a year, through to the second April or May. The photograph alongside was taken in May in Norfolk; the bird may have been sharing the beach with gorgeous summer-plumage birds that were preparing to depart for Siberia. Grey (or Black-Bellied) Plovers are nearly circumpolar breeders. They are missing from Greenland and Northern Scandinavia but breed across the northern coasts of Russia, Alaska and Canada – only three countries but a vast area of tundra.
The next figure is a composite of two of the photographs, created to show the key diagnostic features of an adult and immature in winter plumage. The notches on the tertials are particularly pronounced in the young bird because the feathers were already nearly a year old at this point – it is not always this easy! When assessing the age of any wader, the tertials and coverts are key feathers to check out.
The same thing can happen in Grey Plovers but it is more likely that they will suspend moult in the autumn and then finish in March. In the 
The gender of winter-plumage Grey Plovers cannot be determined, even in the hand, but the summer plumage is pretty diagnostic. A bird with a jet-black belly, with perhaps the odd white tip to a feather, and an almost pure white band behind the black face and neck is probably a male (as here). If the bird is less well-marked – brownish-black on the front with more mottling – then you are likely to be looking at a breeding plumage female. Come the autumn, all of this finery will disappear and the Black-bellied Plover will become a Grey Plover once more.
This blog focuses on the moult of one species. If you want to learn more about moult in general and many other aspects of the behaviour of waders then immerse yourself in Shorebirds in Action, An Introduction to Waders and their Behaviour by Richard Chandler. 
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