Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
A sooty shearwater dances across the waters of the outer Bay of Fundy, where it comes to escape the austral winter.
The tide was high, lazily lapping the shore. Scanning the pearl-gray waters of the Minas Basin, I could see a
dark line midway between myself and the distant headland of Cape Blomidon. At first I thought it must be a
powerful tide rip, but there was something about the way the inky scrawl moved that seemed alive. I raised my
binoculars, and the source of this commotion came into focus—tens of thousands of sandpipers, in massive
bands, crisscrossing and reversing direction like the shuttles of a living loom. Birds were strung out along
thirty degrees of the horizon, perhaps the largest flock that I had ever witnessed, surely numbering more than a
hundred thousand.
In a week these birds, having doubled their weight, would fly 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) nonstop over
the Atlantic to the north coast of South America, employing the same trade winds that brought Christopher
Columbus to the New World. In the spring they would again head north, many stopping on the shores of
Delaware Bay (also a link in the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network) to fatten on horseshoe crab
eggs.
The epic flights of these shorebirds have been knitting the hemispheres together, year after year, for time out
of memory. They are a dramatic demonstration of the interconnectedness of the planet's ecosystems. This an-
nual massing of birds stands as a heartening sign that despite the depredations of the last four centuries since
Europeans first crossed the Atlantic, the natural abundance of this ocean can be preserved and renewed if care
is taken to protect its critical habitats, north and south, along its magnificent coastline.
