From the archive: Biologists hope red knots have turned a corner

After more than a decade monitoring the steady decline of a small migratory shorebird called the red knot, researchers on Delaware Bay are finally hopeful.

For the last several nights, the international crew of bird experts watched as flock after flock - sometimes hundreds of birds at once - lifted off and headed north, bound for their breeding grounds in the Arctic.

"It was inspiring," said Larry Niles, the Department of Environmental Protection biologist who first drew attention to the bird's plight and who is now a consultant for the nonprofit Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey.

"The whole team really felt some satisfaction that, after all this time, we're finally seeing something go right."

In recent years, the birds didn't gain the weight they needed at their Delaware Bay stopover, and the departures were sporadic, uneventful.

But this year, in part because of good weather, the birds did gain weight, priming them for reproductive success. If they have ample young, it could bolster a population considered to be on the brink.

The bay is known worldwide for the springtime spectacle of dozens of shorebird species migrating through. All have declined, but none as much as the red knot.

The knots begin one of the longest migrations on the planet at the tip of South America. Every May, they stop at Delaware Bay, emaciated, to bulk up on the fat-rich eggs of horseshoe crabs, which are just then coming ashore to spawn.

The birds need to double their weight in about 10 days to make it to the Arctic in time to breed and get out before the late-summer snows.

Once numbering nearly 100,000 on the bay, the birds have declined to about 15,000. Biologists blame a reduction in the number of crabs, which were heavily harvested through the 1990s.

Gradually, in what officials said was the first time a species not in trouble was regulated to help another that was, crab harvest restrictions have been enacted.

Still, neither the crabs nor the birds have shown a comeback. Biologists fear the red knots could plummet into extinction with an event as simple as a summer snowstorm in the Arctic or an oil spill in South America.

Advocates have repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, tried to get the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate the bird - a subspecies called Calidris canutus rufa - as federally threatened or endangered.