"It really just alerts the world that its condition is worsening," said Dave Jenkins, chief of the Department of Environmental Protection's Endangered and Nongame Species Program.
The proposal comes just as research in the last month shows that the bird's numbers have dropped further still and that the horseshoe crab it relies on for food is beginning to recover.
To Eric Stiles, conservation director for New Jersey Audubon, the proposed change "means we need to do more."
All migrating shorebirds are in trouble, and these red knots top the list. But unlike the crabs they feed on, the knots serve no specific use for humans other than to provide an annual spectacle of nature. Which surely is one reason crabbers and others are resisting some efforts to save it.
The knot is a robin-size shorebird that has one of the longest migrations on the planet, from the tip of South America to its Arctic breeding grounds.
Partway through this 10,000-mile flight is the bird's most important refueling stopover: Delaware Bay. In May, just as the birds arrive, multitudes of horseshoe crabs are swarming ashore to lay their eggs in the sand.
This lipid-rich food is considered vital. The knots need to gain weight quickly so they can reach the Arctic and reproduce before early snows.
Once numbering 90,000 on the bay, the birds have declined to less than a fifth of that. Biologists blame an aggressive harvest of horseshoe crabs, which are used as bait for whelks, a delicacy in Asia.
Crabs also are captured and bled for the biomedical industry. Their blood is used to detect toxins in various products. But most of these crabs survive and are released.
New Jersey's proposal to change the knot's listing is based on data several years old. It simply took a while for the state to amass enough evidence of changes in other species to warrant the bureaucratic process.
