Globe-spanning bird B95 is back for another year

By Sandy Bauers, Inquirer Staff Writer

POSTED: May 29, 2014

He's been called the toughest four ounces on the planet.

He's just a bird, true, but he flies about 20,000 miles a year, bucking headwinds, and dodging storms - a death-defying trip he has been making for at least 21 years.

Each time researchers spot him, identifiable by the number B95 on an orange leg band, they figure it might be their last sighting.

No bird lives forever, they tell themselves.

But Sunday on Delaware Bay, shorebird scientists spotted yet again what has to be the world's most famous shorebird: a red knot in whose honor statues have been erected and a book written.

At 8 a.m., Argentinian researcher Patricia Gonzalez went out on the deck of the house that an international shorebird team rented at Reeds Beach, Cape May County. She trained her high-magnification scope on a small flock of red knots.

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The crab and the bird: lifting moratorium on horseshoe crabs could affect migratory red knot

A small bird makes an epic flight from Antarctic to Arctic, nearly pole-to-pole, every year.

Along the way, the red knot makes a migratory pit stop in the Delaware Bay, where it eats thousands of eggs from a creature that couldn’t be more different from it: the ancient, helmeted horseshoe crab.

For nearly eight years, the state has protected the horseshoe crabs from fishermen in the hope it would boost the bird’s dwindling numbers worldwide. But that could soon change.

A moratorium protecting horseshoe crabs along New Jersey’s shoreline could soon be lifted, as proposed in a state Assembly bill that’s before a committee today in Trenton.

Environmentalists say lifting the moratorium would up-end a delicate balance in the food chain that’s just beginning to stabilize, after years of over-fishing. The seafood industry says allowing collection of the crabs again would give certain parts of the fishing industry a desperately needed source of bait.

The ongoing ban would end with passage of the bill sponsored by Assemblyman Nelson Albano (D - Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland). The measure is before the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee this afternoon.

Continued:  http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/01/the_crab_and_the_bird_moratori.html