Jeroen Reneerkens is a postdoc at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Among his responsibilities is the coleadership of the Sanderling Project of the International Wader Study Group. This projects aims to learn more about the migration routes, phenology and population dynamics (survival and recruitment) of Sanderlings in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Jeroen reports: "I've just received this photo of a female Sanderling. She was observed yesterday [15 May 2012] in North Bay, South Uist in Scotland. The photograph was taken by Craig Round. We caught and ringed her on 8 July 2003 as an adult in Zackenberg, in northeastern Greenland. I was with Theunis Piersma then as his PhD student, and it was my first time doing fieldwork in the arctic at Zackenberg. I added the colour-ring combination, six years later, in the 2009 breeding season. Her clutches hatched successfully both in 2003 and in 2009.

"She was observed in Walvis Bay, Namibia, on 11 and 13 December 2009 by Mark Boorman. If she, as most Sanderlings are, is faithful to her non-breeding area, she has flown at least 230 000 km in her life already! Amazing animals!"

Yesterday was mid-May, so this bird would have been on passage through Scotland during its migration back to Greenland, to arrive around the end of the month. Ring recoveries show that most of the Sanderling that spend the non-breeding season in South Africa and Namibia breed in Siberia in northern Russia. It is a comparatively recent finding that some unknown proportion of them turn west when they reach Europe and migrate to breed in Greenland.

Mark Boorman is an active SAFRING ringer, based in Swakopmund. All of us can keep a sharp lookout for birds of many species with colour rings and report them to SAFRING.

Of the Animal Demography Unit's array of bird monitoring projects, SABAP2 and SAFRING make the most obvious contribution to an understanding of bird migration. Without this understanding, there would be nothing to celebrate for World Migratory Bird Day this weekend! Bird ringing, and its various derivatives, have enabled us to understand which bird species are migrants, and to track the most amazing long-distance movements of these species across the planet. Bird atlasing, at least if it is done in the way we do it throughout the year in southern Africa, enables us to understand the timing of migration.

The World Migratory Bird Day was initiated in 2006 and is an annual awareness-raising campaign highlighting the need for the protection of migratory birds and their habitats. On the second weekend of May each, people around the world are encouraged to celebrate World Migratory Bird Day. Each year a theme is chosen, and the theme for 2012 is Migratory birds and people – together through time

It was not too long ago that we were starting to think there was nothing more to learn about the migration of the Barn Swallow or that of the Common Tern through bird ringing. There was enough information. If you read the species accounts in the published atlas for SABAP1, they all talk about the timing of migration as if it is set in stone for all time. This paradigm has changed. In January this year, a paper was published in the new journal Nature Climate Change (vol 2, pp 121–124), by Vincent Devictor and 20 other co-authors. It was titled Differences in the climatic debts of birds and butterflies at a continental scale and dealt with the extent to which species (the birds were mostly migrants) are failing to keep pace with increasing temperatures across western Europe. Their paper was based on a sophisticated analysis of citizen science data collected across seven European countries. The results are important in their own right, and highly relevant to the concept of World Migratory Bird Day. But is is the first sentence of the "Acknowledgements" in this paper that I want to highlight: "We thank all skilled volunteer bird- and butterfly-watchers involved in national monitoring programmes; altogether, we estimate that more than 1,500,000 man-hours have been spent to conduct the bird and butterfly monitoring surveys (this estimate only corresponds to field work) necessary to this study."

So I want to end by gently twisting the theme for World Migratory Bird Day for 2012, and changing it to Migratory birds and CITIZEN SCIENTISTS – together through time. The bird ringers and the bird atlasers, the prototype citizen scientists, are the special people who have a critical ongoing role to play in the monitoring of bird migration. So it is essential to find the funding to keep both SAFRING and SABAP2 alive as ongoing projects, empowered to process the data generated by our citizen scientsts, which monitors the impacts of land-use change, climate change, powerlines, windturbines, poisons, ..., on our migrant birds.

Magda Remisiewicz was a postdoc in the ADU for three years, 2008–2010. She now has an academic post at the University of Gdansk in Poland, and is part of a research group there with which the ADU collaborates on studies of waders and seabirds. One of Magda's focuses while she was in South Africa was collecting data on a neglected aspect of moult studies, that of inland (as opposed to coastal) waders, and she did a lot of her fieldwork at the Barberspan Bird Sanctuary in North West Province. Moult, and especially moult of the primaries, is a key component of the annual cycle of birds – essentially they are replacing their means of locomotion. Studies in the ADU have demonstrated that moult lends itself to quantitative analysis and have demonstrated links between the timing of moult and climate. So, in an era of climate change, moult studies represent an important tool for measuring its impact on birds. The photo shows the 10 primary feathers of a Wood Sandpiper. The three outer feathers are old, worn and faded, waiting to be replaced. The six inner primaries are new (and so is one secondary). The seventh primary is about half grown.

This is the first review of the moult of migrant waders since 1979. Tony Prater, one of the early leaders in wader studies, presented this review at a conference held in Cape Town that year, called "Birds of the Sea and Shore."

Remisiewicz, M. 2011. The flexibility of primary moult in relation to migration in Palaearctic waders – an overview. Wader Study Group Bulletin 118: 163–174.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents an overview of patterns in the primary moult of waders using the Eurasian–African migration system and updates earlier summaries with results obtained from the Underhill-Zucchini moult models (1988, 1990). Recent applications of these models allow researchers to examine moult timing down to the progress of an individual feather in a tract and to determine the effects of environmental factors on moult. Waders present a wide variety of inter- and intra-specific strategies for their primary moult, an energy-costly activity they must fit in with breeding and migration, the other main energy-demanding events in their life cycle. Here I present the moult strategies of waders in the context of their age, size, sex and annual variation in breeding success, seasonal food abundance, the latitude where they moult, the distance they migrate, the habitats they use, and the rainfall patterns and temperatures at their moulting grounds. I also discuss how moult is adjusted to these factors. This overview emphasises the flexibility of many waders’ moult strategies as an adaptation to the unpredictable food supply provided by ephemeral inland wetlands and compares these strategies with those of populations that use predictable coastal habitats. Discovering the mechanisms that allow waders to adjust their genetically controlled and hormonally regulated moult to proximate factors is suggested as one of the challenges in further studies of moult.

The Wader Study Group Bulletin is published by the Internatonal Wader Study Group. The IWSG consists of both professionals and amateurs, worldwide, who do research on waders. It holds an annual conference, characterised by good science, good conservation, and good fun. Presentations range from local studies of waders to extensive, long-term studies aiming at a deeper understanding of spectacular wader phenomena like long-distance migration, living in extreme environments and variable reproductive strategies. This year's conference will be held in Séné, Golfe du Morbihan, France, between 21–24 September 2012.

Kobie Raijmakers, with a small team of ringers, is planning a ringing training course at Wakkerstroom, specifically for trainees.
If you a trainee or know of trainees that would be interested, please contact Kobie.
At this stage Kobie would like to gauge interest.
Trainees will be given first option, so if you are a ringer please do not respond at this stage - opportunities for ringers will be announced later, if there is space available.

Venue: Wakkerstroom, BLSA centre
Dates: 1-8 Dec 2012
Contact: Kobie raijmakersk@vodamail.co.za, 082-854-4431
Costs: to be advised closer to the event

Margaux Rat is a PhD student working on Sociable Weavers with Rita Covas. She needs to urgently find stuffed Sociable Weavers (or dead ones) to use as lures. Margaux's request reads as follows:

"I am PhD student based at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. I am working with an international collaborative team on sociable weavers. This team involves researchers from Portugal (Dr. Rita Covas), England (Dr. Rene Van Dijck and Pr. Ben Hatchwell), France (Dr. Claire Doutrelant) and South Africa (Pr. Phil Hockey and myself). Some major aspects of our works involve population dynamics, cooperation and conflict, sexual selection or maternal effects.

For more precision on the project and the team, you may consult our webpage here.

Concerning my part of the project, I am mainly investigating how social interactions may help to maintain cooperation in this species. For one experiment (and potentially more), I would truly benefit from the use of stuffed sociable weavers. I would like to manipulate the size of the bib (enlarged and reduced) of a couple of stuffed sociable weavers. The goal is to determinate if the black bib is a trait signaling social status in this species.

We have tried to find naturally dead sociable weavers in the field to stuff but it is not an easy task as they are often quickly removed by predators and scavengers or too damaged to be mounted. Also, we are really concerned about ethics and we do not want to kill any bird for our research purposes. This leaves us with very few opportunities to get stuffed models.

Consequently, I am contacting you to know if you would not mind to keep aside (in a freezer) any dead sociable weavers (not too damaged) you may encounter during your future birding/ringing trips. It would really contribute to our research."

Contact Margaux: margaux.rat [at] gmail.com