6 October 2025
Yesterday I went to Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary on Cape Cod with one goal in mind: Find out if high tide has reached the Average High Tide marker I saw there in 2017.
Yes, it has. In the past eight years they’ve had to add a short boardwalk over the low spot.
Because it was high tide I was surprised to see ten fiddler crabs scuttling ahead of me on Goose Pond Trail. Three paused near an oak leaf hoping I wouldn’t see them — very hard to see in my cellphone photo.
One fiddler crab thought he was invisible in the grass. He’s holding his fiddle in front of his face.
Bonus birds: Twenty black-bellied plovers (Pluvialis squatarola, “grey plover” in Europe) and one lesser yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes) were loafing in the marsh grass to wait out high tide. (This photo is from Wikimedia Commons.)
Black-bellied plovers are super-alert and quick to fly away in the presence of danger. I missed seeing a northern harrier fly by but they did not. When they called and flew away I confirmed that these bland looking birds had diagnostic black axillaries (armpits).
Though their adult population is estimated to be 1 million to 2.5 million birds, the IUCN listed black-bellied plovers as Vulnerable to extinction in July 2024 because…
While Pluvialis squatarola remains a widespread and abundant species it is listed as Vulnerable in response to increasing evidence for rapid population declines over the past three generations (23 years), estimated to be more than 30%. The exact causes of these declines are unknown, but a myriad of plausible threats have been identified including habitat loss and degradation, disturbance and hunting.
— IUCN Red List: Justification for black-bellied (Grey) plover listing as Vulnerable
Similarly the lesser yellowlegs, whose adult population is about 650,000, was listed as Vulnerable in July 2024 because their migrating population has declined more than 50% in three-generations due to potentially unstable harvest levels (hunting) at migration and non-breeding sites.
That’s it for shorebirds. Today we’re flying home.