Refuge: Shorebird migration under way
Be on the lookout for migratory species returning for the winter, J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge biological science technician Avery Renshaw said. During her biweekly bird surveys of Wildlife Drive and the refuge tract at Bunche Beach across the Sanibel Causeway, Renshaw is seeing marbled godwits, black-bellied plovers, semi-palmated plovers, piping plovers, dunlins and more. She reported: “We see a much wider variety of shorebird species at Bunche Beach compared to on Wildlife Drive, which typically doesn’t host too many shorebirds due to a lack of adequate foraging habitat. Sometimes at low tide on Wildlife Drive you can see a few shorebirds on the sandbars if they’re exposed. But I’ve primarily been seeing the wintering species that I mentioned at our Bunche Beach tract.”