In April I posted this picture of four of our shorebirds camouflaged in their winter plumage. From top to bottom are a piping plover, semipalmated plover, sanderling and dunlin. Most of you could only find two or three of them, but look closely and there are four.

The birds are all currently in their summer breeding plumage and far less camouflaged. Now how many can you see? Click on the photo to enlarge. (answer below)

Labels: common tern, dunlin, piping plover, semipalmated plover, shorebird breeding plumage, shorebird camouflage

What do shorebirds eat? In the wild they rely heavily on bugs and crustaceans they find on the beach, mainly in the wrack, or seaweed, that washes up and is found along the high tide line. In our exhibit, however, it would be a lot of work to constantly haul 50 pounds of wrack into the everyday and we might not know how much the birds are eating.


The public often thinks that we let the birds forage around in the exhibit for their food, and they're partly right. Carefully hidden behind rocks, logs and dunes are dishes for the birds to forage in. We load them up twice a day with a prepared diet called Flamingo Fare (flamingos also eat bugs and crustaceans so it's a great food for shorebirds too) and "live foods" like mealworms. Notice the carrots the mealworms are eating on the left. By "gut loading" our insects first we can assure the birds are getting even more nutrition.







Wax worms are their favorite. These moth larvae have the highest fat content of anything we serve them, I like to think of it as the ice cream of the bug world. No wonder these little inch-long bugs are what they pick out of their dishes first!













We also release a jar of crickets into the exhibit a few times a day and then you can really see the birds forage! Check out the video of sanderlings foraging on our first blog post.








Other food items we might offer are blackworms, trout worms, brine shrimp, fish eggs, copepods and maggots. Yes, maggots! Bon appetite!

-Kate

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Labels: blackworms, crickets, mealworms, shorebird diet, shorebird nutrition, waxworms

Meet our dunlin. She was found along the Cape Cod Canal in 2003 with a fractured left wing. Vets at the Cape Wildlife Center rehabilitated her before she found a permanent home in our exhibit. She can fly a little but not well enough to make her annual breeding migration from as far south as Texas all the way to northern Hudson Bay in Canada. This picture captures her in her winter plumage, check back soon to see her in her beautiful breeding colors!




-Kate

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Labels: dunlin, dunlin migration, Meet our Shorebird Collection

Our exhibit holds one common tern. We nicknamed her "Ike" before we found out she was a female. Ike was found as a chick in the summer of 2005 on a beach in southern Massachusetts. She was mistakenly though to be abandoned by her parents and was brought to a rehabilitation center before we eventually gave her a permanent home.

Tern parents often leave their chicks on the beach while they fish offshore. So if you ever see a tern chick without a parent watch it for a while and I bet you'll see an adult come back pretty soon with a beak full of fish. If you don't see a parent return then contact a local wildlife rehabber or your local animal control officer before you try to handle any wildlife.


Ike is perfectly healthy and can fly very well but we can't release her back into the wild. Common terns need their parents to show them how to migrate and forage for food. We sometimes see her catching live silversides out of the exhibit pool but she's not very good at it, she prefers to eat defrosted fish out of a bowl! You can see her in this picture looking at a silverside that contains her daily vitamin. Check back for video of her catching and eating worms!

-Kate

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Labels: common tern, new england aquarium shorebird exhibit

Our exhibit holds two sanderlings, a male and a female. The male comes to us from a former exhibit and can fly very well. The female was found in the winter of 2007 on a beach on Long Island. Vets in New York discovered severe fractures of her radius and ulna and successfully rehabilitated her, although she can not fly. She therefore has found a permanent home in our exhibit. You can tell her apart from the male because of her slightly droopy right wing. They are seen here in their winter plumage. They're currently in the midst of their spring molt so check back in a few months to see them in their full breeding plumage.



-Kate

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Labels: Kate, Meet our Shorebird Collection, new england aquarium shorebird exhibit, sanderling

Labels: shorebird exhibit; bird exhibit access

The most frequently asked question I get from our younger visitors is "how do you get out?" It does appear from the visitor side that when I'm in the shorebird exhibit I am in fact stuck since there's no visible door.

Here you can see my two long-time volunteers, Becky and Julia, behind the mesh feeding the fish. So how do we get in and out? Check back Friday to learn the answer!




-Kate

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Labels: Kate, shorebird exhibit; bird exhibit access