Web flights

Natural History, May, 1998 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

Whether you are a serious birder hoping to add a rare species to your life fist or a casual nature-watcher interested in observing the annual ebb and flow of avian activity, the Internet is a good place for finding out which birds are moving through your area at any given time. The sites are particularly useful for tracking elusive, long-distance migrants such as shorebirds. The best place to start is the Shorebird Watcher (pw1.netcom.com/~djhoff/shorebrd.html), maintained by Dick and Jean Hoffmann. This attractive site has a plethora of links to other Internet sites related to the birds.

Among the offerings are sites that play recordings of the songs of many species. As any birder knows, a bird's call is often the best way to distinguish one species from another. I tried one or two sites and listened to a lot of bird songs and calls, including those of a few shorebird species (www.mbr.nbs.gov/id/songlist.html).

At the Virtual Birder, you can test your knowledge by trying to match calls with photographs (www.virtualbirder.com/ vbirder/matcher/matcherDirs/SONG/ index.html). I also found a Virtual Birder site (www.virtualbirder.com/vbirder/ realbirds/dbhsc/index.html) with an article about the crisis at Delaware Bay, where fishing for horseshoe crabs has led to a drop in numbers of incoming shorebirds. The site explains the chain of events, recent developments, and how you can help.

Via the Internet, the Virtual Birder also takes you on a trip to the wetlands of Cape Cod and other destinations to give you an idea of which birds to expect on a real trip. Two other sites have general information on the best places for encountering shorebird migrations: the Great Outdoor Recreation Page (www.gorp.com/gorp/activity/birding.htm) and the Wetlands Network (www.wetlands.ca/ exploring/exploring.html). While visiting Wetlands, check out the home of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (www.wetlands.ca/wi-a/whsrn /whsrndex.html) for events, workshops, and information about each area in the vast chain of wetlands vital to migrating shorebirds.

On the Shorebird Sister Schools Program site (www.fws.gov/~r7enved/ ssspenhan.html), kids and teachers can follow migrations, join discussion groups, plan classroom activities, and learn about birds that travel the Pacific flyway. Shorebird identification tips, interviews with people who study shorebirds, and a profile of the program's ambassador species, the western sandpiper, are among the hyperlinks available at this site.

Individuals can also report their own sightings on the Internet. In the unlikely event that you have seen an Eskimo curlew, for example, you can contact the Canadian Society for Endangered Birds (www.wetlands.ca/wi-a/whsrn/ecurlew .html). To help you spot this endangered shorebird, the society provides pictures of its known associates and traveling companions, as well as pictures of birds with which it is easily confused. But don't look too hard. Although large flocks of Eskimo curlews once flew from the Texas coast to the Arctic, this species is now close to extinction.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.