By Abril Copalli Heredia Morales

There are some scenes in nature that turn into great memories and experiences, such as watching a couple of Marbled Godwits (Limosa fedoa) in territorial behavior the morning after a thunderstorm in a marsh in South Dakota.

And a couple of months later, during the winter, watching hundreds of them gathered and feeding in the wetlands of Baja California. Both are contrasting situations: the habitat changes, their number, so does the behavior and even the beak color, from orange to pink in the elder Marbled Godwits.

The Marbled Godwit has a marbled plumage in shades of cinnamon and black, having a beautiful pattern in each feather, also, a distinctive long beak allows them to explore the substrates of sand and mud searching for food, especially invertebrate organisms that find shelter in the sediment.

The word Limosa comes from the Latin limus, which means mud. A mudflat represents many opportunities for birds to find food and therefore, gain energy.

In the summer, the Marbled Godwits fly to their breeding areas, most of them are in the Great Plains in North America, a place that creates a green landscape together with ponds, rivers and lagoons.

At the end of the summer and during fall, the Marbled Godwits begin to migrate towards their wintering areas, which are great extensions of wetlands next to the sea. These areas can be found in the Atlantic and Pacific side of Mexico. The migration route involves temporality, navigation mechanisms and the distance between the breeding, resting and wintering areas.

Recently, we have been able to track the movement of several Marbled Godwits through their southward and northward migration, including information about a Marbled Godwit wintering in the Ojo de Liebre Lagoon in Guerrero Negro, Baja California Sur that flew over areas like Arizona, Nevada and Utah, USA (Olson et al. 2014).

Bird records indicate that the wetlands in the peninsula of Baja California are important areas for the Marbled Godwits (Page et al. 1997). Bahía de Todos Santos and mostly the Estuary of Punta Banda in Ensenada are areas where you can find hundreds of Marbled Godwits gathered at the mudflats during low tide.

The natural seasonality of the habitats in the different latitudes of the continent brings many conditions in which the Marbled Godwits are adapted in the annual cycle, however, the migration also involves a more abstract but yet real aspect: the birds inevitably migrate through geopolitical and cultural borders, and in this way, the relationship between man and nature also has an effect on the patterns of the available habitats of the Marbled Godwit. 

And so, migration may trigger a sense of curiosity and a feeling of admiration for the events of nature, and also brings an opportunity for a better relationship with the other species that surround us.

About the author

Abril studied Biology in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) and has a Master’s Degree in Marine Ecology from the Centro de Investigación Científica y de Enseñanza Superior de Ensenada (CICESE). Her thesis project involves an analysis of the effects of anthropogenic disturbance regarding the density of marine birds in Bahía de Todos Santos. She has collaborated in multiple projects monitoring birds with the Society of Yukon Bird Observatories, Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas A.C. and Bird Conservancy of the Rockies since 2011.

References

• Olson, B. E., Sullivan, K. A., & Farmer, A. H. (2014). Marbled Godwit migration characterized with satellite telemetry. The Condor, 116 (2), 185-194.
• Page, G. W., Palacios, E., Alfaro, L., González, S., Stenzel, L. E., & Jungers, M. (1997). Numbers of Wintering Shorebirds in Coastal Wetlands of Baja California, México (Numeros de Aves Playeras Invernando en los Anegados Costeros de Baja California, México). Journal of Field Ornithology, 562-574.