With cinnamon-colored feathers, a long, upturned bill and a curious name, the marbled godwit is distinctive in many ways. And when Museum ornithologist Dr. Brian O\u2019Shea and colleagues spotted a small number of these birds during January fieldwork it wasn\u2019t just cool, it was significant.<\/p>\n
In a new paper published in the Journal of Caribbean Ornithology<\/em>, O\u2019Shea and colleagues report the first observations of the marbled godwit in Suriname, French Guiana and Guyana. These records expand the known distribution of the species on the north coast of South America. \u201cWe were thrilled to find these birds,\u201d O\u2019Shea says.<\/p>\n The coasts of these three countries \u2014 bordered by Brazil to the south and the Atlantic to the north \u2014 make up one of the most important areas for migratory shorebirds in the Americas. But there are many emerging challenges in the region that will require global cooperation to address. The rapid expansion of offshore oil drilling in Guyana (and soon Suriname) threatens to disrupt the delicate ecology, rising sea levels wash away the mudflats and mangrove forests that shorebirds depend on, even shorebird hunting, despite being illegal, takes a disheartening toll.<\/p>\n O\u2019Shea\u2019s research on marbled godwits and other shorebirds has spawned conservation partnerships geared toward fostering appreciation of these remarkable birds across cultures and providing them with safe havens as they traverse the hemisphere each year. His January survey was part of a broader effort to establish a shorebird reserve along the eastern coast of Guyana and the area where he found the godwits was in the core of a proposed reserve zone \u2014 a vast mud bank that has been known to host up to 100,000 shorebirds at a time.<\/p>\n \u201cPublishing our observation of marbled godwits in the Guianas,\u201d O\u2019Shea adds, \u201chas allowed us to again highlight this extraordinary region and its importance for shorebirds, climate resilience and global conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":117697,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/117696"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/117696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117701,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/117696\/revisions\/117701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}