Pedido da Holanda para colaboração na identificação jovens de Calidris alba

Boa noite
Recebi um pedido de colaboração do  Jeroen Reneerkens J.W.H.Reneerkens@rug.nl , que desde há anos estuda os Pilritos das praias, as suas migrações e evolução populacional, no sentido de identificar e quantificar os exemplares jovens em relação com os bandos.
Como podem ver pelo texto que enviou este foi um mau ano para estas aves pelo que seria importante darmos uma ajuda com informações sobre estes irrequietos visitantes das nossas praias.
Podem descarregar o manual de identificação neste local: http://www.waderstudygroup.org/docs/SandAge_man_en.pdf
e também é possível obtêm-lo noutras línguas

Dear observer,

you receive this announcement, because you kindly supported our international sanderling research coordinated by the International Wader Study Group by reporting your sightings of colour-ringed Sanderlings and/or counting age ratios of Sanderling flocks in the (recent) past.

Sanderlings have returned from their High Arctic breeding areas and we once again would like to ask you for your help to gain more insights into Sanderling´s breeding success this year. We are glad to head straight into our third season, for which we await exciting results similar to those of the preceding years 2012 and 2013 (see attached newsletter).

Research by ourselves and others in the High Arctic show that we may expect few juveniles this year due to extensive snowfall and a slow melt and due to a lack of lemmings. Clutches in Northeast Greenland were laid very late (up to three weeks later than average), incomplete (2-3 eggs per clutch only) and suffered from a lot of predation. It would thus be very interesting to quantify how bad this year’s reproduction has been on the level of the population and –on the longer run- to discover what the consequences of years with bad reproduction are for its development (population increase or decrease).

We can only discover this together. Therefore, we kindly ask you for your help. Not only do we hope to enlarge the group of participants once again, but also hope to stimulate you to perform repeated counts at the same locations as the season progresses. Those repeated counts are of enormous importance if we try to grasp the spatial and temporal scale of juvenile sanderlings.

As in the previous years, we´d like to ask you to follow a consistent method as outlined in the attached field manual. Don´t hesitate to ask for extra copies in different languages (English, French, Spanish or German). Also, please spread the word among your birding friends to participate for their help; ageing and counting together is more fun than alone.

We highly appreciate you contribution and to hear about your impressions from the field. We look forward to present you another newsletter with exciting results of this season´s Sanderling age ratios!

With kind regards,

Hilger and Jeroen
on behalf of the Sanderling Project Group of the IWSG.



Termino com o email de hoje que ele enviou
Hi José,

thank you very much for your offer. I think that it could be extremely useful to ask for collaboration on the Portuguese bird forum. All the information is in the manual (which I only have in English, Spanish, French and German....but not in Portuguese). It is important that the observers (1) are certain about how to age sanderlings, we hope for reliable data but also explain in our manual how to recognise adults and juveniles so that also inexperienced observers can practice their identification skills, (2) try to count and age as many as possible individual sanderlings and (3) that they should not estimate but really try to count the adult and juvenile individuals one by one. It does not matter if that can not be done for each individual of an entire flock, but I prefer to hear that there were "6 juveniles and  138 adult sanderlings in a total group of an (estimated) 600" than "ca. 5% was juvenile in a flock of 600".

A link to the English manual can be found here: http://www.waderstudygroup.org/docs/SandAge_man_en.pdf

Thanks again for your help!
best wishes,
Jeroen