A Conversation with “Red”

This is a transcript of my conversation with a human birder on the sandy edge of a mudflat, one of many such places along the shores of eastern North America. 

You probably think I am one of your species, Homo sapiens (an oxymoron if there ever was one), making up a story anthropomorphising me, a bird. Of course, I don’t think as humans do, and I don’t speak or write English or any of your human languages. However, I prefer to think that the author is not just making up a story, but channeling my spirit.

Hey you! Yes, you - the biped with that funny floppy hat and those eyeball extenders you call binoculars. Why are you looking at me like that? Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to stare? You are making me and the other birds here nervous

I can see that you don’t know my name, since you are flipping randomly through pictures in that field guide. You probably have mistaken me for one of my cousins, a Dowitcher or even a Lesser Yellowlegs. I am a Red Knot.  Any Eagle or Peregrine Falcon could tell exactly who I was from a mile away without binoculars. Of course, they would just call me lunch. 

I am also known in some rather pedantic circles as Calidris canutus. In Tierra del Fuego at the Southern tip of South America, where I will spend your winter, the humans will call me Correlimos Gordo. I have also been known by many other names in Inuit, Mi’kmaq, Chocktaw, Quechua, and other amerindian languages. Of course, those guys didn’t need a book or binoculars to recognize me. Unfortunately, they also sometimes thought of me as lunch. But, they weren’t greedy (or perhaps they just didn’t have the tools you humans now have for mass slaughter).

Pardon me if I keep eating while we talk. I’m really enjoying all these little arthropods and snails. You don’t think they look very appetizing? Well, you can pull out your bologna sandwich and join me for lunch. But, wouldn’t you rather have a lobster roll from that place in Wiscasset, Maine, or a crab cake from that shack in Tilghman Island, Maryland, or boiled crawfish from Lafayette, Louisiana. I’ll bet you even liked those fried clams you used to get at HoJo’s. And, whole, fried soft shelled crabs - a bit too much of an adventure for some of you, but mmmm goooood if you can get past all those legs dangling out of the bun. 

Of course, you humans don’t always eat those arthropods and mollusks raw like I do. But, haven’t I seen you at that beach side bar eating raw oysters on the half-shell, or maybe you liked that conch ceviche in Key West, or the sushi rolls with raw fish and seaweed you can get everywhere now. 

My favorite food in the spring, on my way north, is the eggs of the horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay.  You say you don’t like fish eggs. Haven’t I seen you eating caviar?  I know you don’t eat the eggs of horseshoe crabs (at least I don’t think you do). But, you guys have been scooping up more than your share of those horseshoe crabs. Their unusual blood has some real medical uses I’ll admit, but I really don’t think using them for bait and fertilizer is a good idea. Fortunately, in some places you have stopped taking these horseshoe crabs. In the last few years that has really helped us Red Knots to reach our arctic breading grounds in good condition. 

I spent the summer in northern Canada, above the Arctic Circle where we nested on the tundra raising chicks. I commute between the arctic and Tierra del Fuego every year. It’s about 9,000 miles down there and another 9,000 back north next spring. Some of us have made that trip nearly 20 times. The really amazing part is that the youngsters, born in the arctic, make the trip the first time by themselves without any adult guide. 

My migration is a long haul, but I make a few stops along the way. However, my cousin, the Bar-tailed Godwit, flies over 7000 miles non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand. You probably get fanny fatigue on a five hour flight to Hawaii, and all you have to do is sit in that flying sardine can you call an airplane. The Godwit flies under his own power for more than nine days over open ocean without stopping.

Of course, those long flights require a lot of fuel. The Bar-tailed Godwit and many others of us eat enough to double our body weight before these long distance flights.  But, most of us do need to stopover and fill up on goodies at a few special beaches and mudflats. Think of it as when you make a cross country road trip on a long lonely stretch of highway. A stop at a 24-hour Waffle House for some apple pie and coffee sounds awfully good around midnight. We, unlike you humans, need all those calories and will loose all that extra weight with the exercise we get on our long flights. And, we do it using renewable energy, no spewing fossil fuel carbon into the stratosphere like your jetliners do.  

Unfortunately, many of our favorite migration stopovers no longer provide the quality or amount of food that they used to. That would be like getting to your midnight Waffle House expecting pie and finding that they only have a few Cheetos and celery sticks. Lots of places where we used to like to stop are not very pleasant any more. Mudflats have been dredged and filled, the waterfront covered with condos, and sediments fouled with human and chemical wastes. It is like that Waffle House, or your favorite park, was bulldozed and turned into a landfill. 

I am also getting pretty lonely these days, My species has dwindled to only about a quarter of the number that existed forty years ago, less than half of one of your lifetimes. Imagine what it would be like if three of every four of your human friends and neighbors were to disappear. But, thanks for putting me on your list of “Endangered and Threatened Species”. That may help, though I worry about the way the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is being ignored and reinterpreted these days.

Well, it’s been great talking with you, but I have to get going - it’s a long way to Tierra del Fuego. But, let me give you a suggestion. Put Homo sapiens on the Endangered Species list with the rest of us. You haven’t done real well with that Covid-19 pandemic. It looks like your civilization may be a real house of cards. As big and beautiful as that house may seem now, the climate change you have brought on is going to take it down.