The Western Sandpiper, Calidris mauri, is the most abundant shorebird in Western North America, numbering from 2-4 million individuals.  Up to half a million Western Sandpipers pass through the Fraser River Delta on their northward migration each spring, making it a species of local interest and importance.

Members of the Wildlife Ecology Chair at Simon Fraser University, located near Vancouver, British Columbia, are engaged in research on this species throughout its annual range, from Alaska to Ecuador.   We also foster a cooperative network to examine the year-round activities of highly migratory shorebirds, emphasizing the Western Sandpiper, the Western Sandpiper Research Network.  

Major aspects of work, and participants, include:

feeding-predation danger tradeoffs, particularly at migratory stopover sites (Ron Ydenberg and David Lank at SFU, Rob Butler (Canadian Wildlife Service), plus graduated PhD student Andrea Pomeroy, and MSc students Nick Wolfe and James Burns; currently: MSc student David Hope). To see a video of over oceaning flock by dunlin, click here.

We have additional contacts and relationships with shorebird students in Ecuador, Columbia, Mexico, California, Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere.

One emerging general theme in this research is how birds balance the tradeoff between foraging effort and the risk of predation, particularly by migratory falcons. The return of falcons to the landscapes of both the Americas and Europe over the past 20 years have substantial implications for their prey. We have evidence of changes in habitat utilization during migration, with decreased usage of riskier stopover sites in favor of larger more open sites, despite apparently poorer feeding at the larger sites. Such habitat shifts, if general have substantial implications for the shorebird population monitoring schemes and the detection of long-term population trends. Another change is the dramatic increase in over-ocean flocking by wintering dunlin as an anti-predation strategy during high tides. (Click here for a video depicting over-ocean flocking.)


We have organized 10 somewhat annual "Western Sandpiper Workshops" over the past 14 years to foster collaboration and communication among research network participants and other interested persons.

Abstracts from two workshops are linked below:

Abstracts from 7th Western Sandpiper Workshop, Jan 2003
Abstracts from 6th Western Sandpiper Workshop, Oct 2000