Safeguarding the Sandpiper

Inside the Career of David Mizrahi, New Jersey Audubon’s vice president of research and monitoring

It’s late May and the temperature is steaming into the 90s on the mud flats in Heislerville, NJ. More than a thousand Semipalmated Sandpipers — toes webbed for part of their length — are poking around in the South Jersey mud, side to side with hundreds of Dunlins, Short-billed Dowitchers and Black-bellied Plovers. Ruddy Turnstones peck under small pebbles. Black Skimmers rest on a black-green log. A Bald Eagle surveys overhead.

The banding is smooth and steady — the team knows one another well. David Mizrahi guides the process as the sandpipers move from the nets to the holding boxes to a banding table between two tailgates, tarpaulin shielding the birds as well as the team. Check the bird’s appearance. Weigh it. Measure the wing span, beak and head. Take a tiny blood sample. Band. Release. Repeat.

David has been doing this work for more than more than 20 years, 17 for New Jersey Audubon. Today, he is one of the world’s preeminent shorebird researchers, working up and down the Atlantic from New Jersey to the birds’ wintering homes in South America.

Throughout the world, shorebirds are declining at a rapid rate. During his career, David and NJA’s research team has documented significant declines in the ability of Semipalmated Sandpipers to gain enough weight to get to their migration to breeding grounds in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. These birds can weigh as little as four or five nickels in springtime. Changing climate, hunting, habitat loss, the lack of food resources such as the eggs of horseshoe crabs — all have had drastic effects on the populations of migrating shorebirds like these.

“My first year in the field was 1995,” David recalls. “It was just me and my wife in a Nissan Sentra hatchback, setting up a few nets on Thompson’s Beach and catching as many sandpipers as we needed. It was a challenge to put all our gear in that hatchback and still have room for each other.”

Early in his career, David was mostly interested in the trigger that caused the bird to decide to migrate on a given day.

“At that time, I wasn’t trying to understand things like their weight gain factors during their Delaware Bay stopover,” he says. “That didn’t happen until I came to New Jersey Audubon, though even then there was a basic understanding that there was tremendous pressure on these birds due to the decline of the horseshoe crab. There had already been several years of heavy, unchecked crab harvesting. We knew things were happening.”

Banding birds on two continents was not the future David imagined while growing up in Queens, N.Y.

“My love affair with birds started kind of late,” he remembers. “As a kid, we would go outdoors and collect frogs and salamanders,“ he remembers, “but birds weren’t accessible to me. You couldn’t pick up a bird and observe it like a snake or turtle. The Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge was a couple of miles from where I lived, but it might as well have been a world away.”

That was until a friend told him what he had seen at the New York refuge. David recalls: “He said it was like Africa, only in Queens!”

David laughs. “I went to see for myself, and at the refuge I saw thousands of ducks flying from the bay into the west pond. I got obsessed. I borrowed a pair of my Dad’s old binoculars, bought a field guide and an old scope and I never looked back. I had found my calling.”

At Jamaica Bay, David met the renowned bird photographer Arthur Morris, and joined him in doing shorebird surveys. He went on to earn a degree in Biology at the State University of New York and a Ph.D. from Clemson University, where he studied under Sid Gauthreaux, an early pioneer in the use of radar to study migration.

These days, David, along with colleagues from Aquasis in Brazil, conservation groups in Suriname and French Guiana and others involved such efforts as the Atlantic Flyway Shorebird Initiative, are looking at the decline in shorebirds as an international conservation threat.

“Although resources remain an issue, there is a growing understanding that protecting these birds and their migratory stopovers is an international problem,” he says. “Otherwise the work you do for half a year in one location can easily be undone in another.”

Despite the drastic decline in Semipalmated Sandpiper populations over the last three decades (from more than 2 million to about 500,000), David sees hope on the horizon.

“In the last couple of years have we started to see a slight uptick in their rate of weight gain and in the average energy reserves that birds can accumulate while they are here,” he says. “More crabs are spawning, which means more eggs on the beach, which means the birds are gaining more weight. That’s one less threat this species faces on its journey.

“The incredible thing about these tiny birds is their resilience and flexibility,” David adds. “They live a long time: 12 years or more. Every year they go from the tropics to breed in the Arctic and then back south again — 5,000 miles a year! For a bird to live that kind of lifestyle and overcome both natural and man-made obstacles … that’s a tough bird.

“Is it a risky life? Yes, of course it is risky. But the fact that these birds continue to engage in these long annual migrations suggest that this is a strategy that works. If it didn’t work, we wouldn’t see it.

“Mother Nature doesn’t suffer bad strategies.”

This article appears in edited form in the Winter 2018 issue of New Jersey Audubon Magazine.