News Flash

GCA is pleased and proud to announce that it is a recipient of a second grant from Patagonia, Inc. under its Environmental Grants Program. We are most appreciative of this financial support from a company that puts its money and its business practices squarely in the green corner.

Red Knots Return to Cape May

Well, we expect they will. And they will. But how many and for how long?

Initial reports from Tierra del Fuego show only eleven thousand birds there during the 2010-2011 winter, down from sixteen thousand the year before. Knot so encouraging. If the eleven thousand number is accurate, that's a terrible drop. How many will show at Delaware Bay in 2012? We shall see. In 2009 there was a rebound to something like twenty to twenty-five thousand, an encouraging bounce, but that is obviously not a continuing trend. Just the opposite, really, an anomaly.

There is a fickle formula at work here that flirts with disaster, as the population numbers steadily diminish, if:

a) the downward trend simply continues, for whatever reasons, or

b) some egregious event claims more knots, like an oil spill (If they can ruin the Gulf of Mexico, they can ruin Delaware Bay.), an extra-nasty Arctic spring or even more reduction in the volume of egg-laying horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay.