The Maritime provinces entertain many visitors over the summer months, but one tourist in particular is showing up by the thousands.
Twice a year, sandpipers lay their eggs in the Canadian Arctic and, when they’re strong enough, their young join hundreds of thousands of other sandpipers as they migrate to South America.
About 75 per cent of the world’s population of semipalmated sandpipers stop on New Brunswick beaches to rest and regain their strength, and some have already started to appear in Johnson’s Mills, N.B.
“Into August, we’re going to get flocks of anywhere between 100,000 to 150,000,” says Amanda Didychuk of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
When the tide is out, the birds scatter and feed on tiny mud shrimp. When the tide is in, the birds congregate on the narrow beach.
Hannah Kienzle of the Nature Conservancy of Canada says the show begins when the birds take flight.
“Essentially a large cloud of birds, they’re extremely close together and somehow they manage not to hit each other,” says Kienzle. “They’re flying right next to each other in these massive clouds. As they shift and change directions, it changes colour a little bit, it’s very cool to watch.”
This year, the birds are making their stop on a much larger piece of protected shoreline, as the community works to protect their vital habitat.
The Nature Conservancy of Canada has recently expanded the amount of protected land at the head of the Bay of Fundy; it secured four properties with about 57 acres of land at Dorchester Cape.
“A lot of the properties, when you walk around the banks you’ll see some chairs, some benches along the coast, which really just shows the fact that this is an environmentally important area of New Brunswick,” says Sharoni Mitra of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
Once the birds have eaten their fill of mud shrimp, almost doubling their weight, they will begin the second leg of their migration – a three-day non-stop 5,000 kilometre flight to South America.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Jonathan MacInnis
