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A great egret feeds its hungry young.
Early the next morning, I made way for the once-sleepy fishing village of Reed's Beach, which has become
a prime site for shorebird watchers in spring—and there, strung along the crescent beaches, beside the modest
fishers' homes and cottages, were long lines of shorebirds, chirring with delight and seemingly oblivious to
our presence as they went about the business of probing the sands for horseshoe crab eggs. I should not have
been surprised that one day there were no birds or crabs in sight and the next they were there by the tens of
thousands. Such is the nature of the biological clocks that dictate the movements and behaviors of many spe-
cies, arguably including our own, for here I was timing my arrival from 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) away to
arrive at a remote beach the morning after the full moon.
As a longtime resident of the Bay of Fundy, where more than a million shorebirds stop over to feed in late
summer on their return journey from Arctic breeding grounds, I had seen impressive massings of shorebirds
before. But I was surprised and delighted by the bold markings of the shorebirds assembled on the beach. I
was used to seeing the shorebirds at a time of the year when their summer feathering was beginning to fade in-
to the drab and muted tones of winter's plumage. But here were ruddy turnstones and red knots flashing their
robin-red markings—red knots were once called “robin snipes”—as advertisements that breeding season was
nigh. Even the normally monotone semipalmated sandpipers, stretched in a long line almost as far as the eye
could see, displayed unusually bold, crisp markings. But no crabs were in sight; obviously they had arrived on
the high tide to lay their eggs and then retreated again into the sea.
In search of crabs, I moved onto nearby Thompson's Beach. “Beach” might seem a misnomer, for the shore
is nowhere to be seen. Sea level rise due to climate change has overwhelmed this former beachfront town, as it
has many others along Delaware Bay, so that only pilings remain today, and one enters a pool-table-flat ex-
panse of marshlands subdivided by tidal creeks. Thompson's Beach is now owned by one of New Jersey's ma-
