Ginny Chan of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research reports:
On 18 October 2017, David Chan, an intern at Royal NIOZ, presented a poster in the HKU Science Undergraduate Research Poster Presentation, at The University of Hong Kong. The poster is titled Site fidelity of shorebirds fuelling in China, and focuses on two species of shorebirds, Bar-tailed Godwits and Great Knots, along the China coast.
Using banded individuals with colour rings and engraved flags, we showed that Bar-tailed Godwit individuals are more loyal to the same stopover site than individual Great Knots. For more details, please check the poster on ResearchGate.
This analysis is an important first step to understand how shorebirds are affected by habitat loss in their staging sites. In a previous paper in Wader Study, we demonstrated that the main habitats of Bar-tailed Godwits in the south Yellow Sea coast in Jiangsu Province, China, are planned to be reclaimed. As Bar-tailed Godwits are shown to be loyal to their staging site, it is unlikely that individuals can redistribute to other staging sites. This further strengthen our argument that ‘loss of habitats equals loss of birds’.
Further reading
Theunis Piersma, Ying-Chi Chan, Tong Mu, Chris J. Hassell, David S. Melville, He-Bo Peng, Zhijun Ma, Zhengwang Zhang, David S. Wilcove (2017). Loss of habitat leads to loss of birds: reflections on the Jiangsu, China, coastal development plans. Wader Study 124: 93-98. doi: 10.18194/ws.00077
