Dear Chapter Leaders,

Your assistance in forwarding the message below to expert birders living near the Wildlife Refuges noted will be much appreciated. This is a wonderful opportunity to partner with refuges and help migrating birds while also contributing to Gulf restoration efforts.

Thank you,

Audubon Action

Audubon and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Need Your Help to Survey National Wildlife Refuges for Migrating Shorebirds.

Because of the Deep Horizon oil catastrophe, much of the gulf coastal environment, especially bird habitat has been significantly degraded and with fall migration underway, we are concerned about the use of that habitat by migrants. Safe shallow-water shorebird and waterfowl habitat is being created to 'short-stop' southbound migrants in an attempt to prevent some of these birds from using oiled coastal habitats. As migration has started and the habitat modifications are underway, USFWS, NRCS, and other entities need to begin to document whether and how these habitat creation programs are working and whether birds may also be moving between clean and oiled habitats. Audubon and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service are undertaking a shorebird monitoring program on a number of National Wildlife Refuges where habitat modifications have been made to attract shorebirds during migration.

Audubon has been asked by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to identify volunteers that are proficient in shorebird identification and would be available this fall to complete shorebird surveys of a handful of selected refuges in your state. As the fall migration is well underway, we would like to quickly identify qualified individuals, i.e. experienced birders only and ideally with good shorebird ID skills, to conduct these surveys immediately to collect a good baseline data set for this fall. We will be using a survey protocol that Audubon has developed to count birds and monitor habitat use by migrant shorebirds as well as all other birds encountered. Data will be stored in eBird, where it will be immediately available to the public, Audubon, USFWS, and other federal and state agencies for analyses. We will use either a "traveling" or "stationary" protocol in eBird to do these surveys.

We need experienced birders who would be available to do these surveys twice a month from now until the end of October, or perhaps into early November. Ideally we would want folks who are relatively close to the refuges in question (see list below) so that transportation to and from the refuge will not be an issue, and so housing is not a factor. If you are interested in this exciting opportunity to participate in this Audubon/Fish & Wildlife Service partnership shorebird survey on National Wildlife Refuges, please follow the link below to a short registration form (different from the Audubon gulf volunteer form that you may have already filled out) that you can fill out to express your interest and tell us a little bit more about yourself to assist in our selection of volunteers.

 www.audubonaction.org/refugesurvey

Thank you for your interest, we look forward to hearing from you. We will collect registrations and select volunteers based on experience, location and availability. We will select a small team 5-10 per refuge and we may need several alternates. We hope to get volunteers out doing surveys within the next 2 weeks.

For questions or more information please send an email to audubonaction@audubon.org

Refuges surveys will take place on:

Louisiana

Florida

St. Marks