On the morning of October 21, I woke up to a text from David Mizrahi, vice president of research at New Jersey Audubon, who leads the Cape May Songbird Stopover Project. A Northern Waterthrush we'd been following from Cape May had just been detected in Caracas, Venezuela.
At 4:19 that morning, before sunrise, a crowd-sourced device (most likely someone’s cellphone) in western Caracas picked up the signal from the bird's tag. It's the first bird from the Cape May Songbird Stopover Project to turn up in Venezuela. To explain why that one detection meant so much to me, I have to go back to 2019.
Eilat, 2019
I met Miguel Matta at the International Bird Observatory Conference in Eilat, Israel, in March 2019. Miguel and his collaborators gave a talk on bird banding at the Portachuelo Banding Station in Venezuela's Henri Pittier National Park. I remember that Northern Waterthrush was one of the most common birds in their nets.
We'd just started studying waterthrushes at Cape May a couple years prior, when we started the banding station. So much of what I'd read talked about them wintering in the Caribbean. Hearing how many Miguel was catching in the mountains of northern Venezuela got me wondering how far our Cape May birds go, and where they end up.
At the time I was director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, about to move over to Cellular Tracking Technologies. It was clear from that first conversation that Miguel was someone I wanted to work with. I told him that if there was ever a way for us to collaborate, I'd love to do it.
Seven years of trading notes
Over the years, we've tried to support Miguel's work however we could. He's done great work on swifts, and he's been expanding the Motus network of tracking stations in Venezuela. From that first day, he struck me as someone who gets things done. Those are the people you want to line up with when you're trying to grow research projects and support good work.
Miguel and I stayed friends, and we'd trade notes whenever our birds did something interesting. But as far as we know, no bird Miguel tagged in Venezuela had ever turned up in Cape May, and none of ours had turned up in Venezuela.
This spring, Miguel came to us. He spent the season on Delaware Bay with David Mizrahi's crew, banding and tagging Semipalmated Sandpipers for David's long-term research on the species. I got to see him out on the bay in May.
This season's waterthrushes
The Cape May Songbird Stopover Project is based at The Nature Conservancy's South Cape May Meadows Preserve. New Jersey Audubon runs the banding station there, and David Mizrahi puts the tags on the birds. This fall we tagged more Northern Waterthrushes than in any year before.
Each bird carries a small BlūSeries tag (BlūBat this year). Phones, Motus receiver stations with BlūSeries Receivers, including Terra devices and CTT SensorStations and Nodes, log the tag whenever they're close enough to hear it, so every detection is a time and a place.
The waterthrushes have given us a lot to follow. We've tracked them down peninsular Florida, out to the Bahamas, and on to Cuba, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Seven have now been detected in Colombia, some of them working their way south into the country. But none had turned up in Venezuela, and I kept wondering whether one ever would.
NOWA_26-27
The bird in Caracas is NOWA_26-27. New Jersey Audubon tagged it at the banding station on September 2, and it spent the next three weeks feeding in the Meadows.
On the morning of September 5, it made a loop around Cape Island. It was at Cape May Point by 6:46 a.m. At 7:38 it was moving north up the Higbee Beach dike, and one of its detections came from right off the interpretation tower in front of the Morning Flight counters. That's Cape May Bird Observatory's count of songbirds flying up the bayshore after a night of migration. By 8:07 the bird was back in the Meadows.
According to Trektellen data for that day, Aaron Reb and Tom Reed tallied 107 Northern Waterthrushes, 39 of them in the hour our bird passed. Given that it pinged off someone’s device right over the platform, I’d bet it was one of those 39.
(link to Trektellen record for that day)
NOWA_26-27 was last heard at Cape May at 7:19 p.m. on September 24, just after sunset. Two other tagged waterthrushes were last heard there within the same 11 minutes. One reached Key Biscayne, Florida, by September 26. The other turned up in Cuba on October 11.
Then we heard nothing from NOWA_26-27 for 26 days, until that ping in Caracas. That's about 3,260 km (2,025 miles) from Cape May in a straight line.
What's next
Will it keep going? The Portachuelo Banding Station sits at 1,136 m on Paso Portachuelo, about 80 km west of Caracas. People have studied migration in those mountains since William Beebe worked at nearby Rancho Grande in the 1940s, and the Portachuelo nets have run during migration since 1990. The Motus stations there don’t have BlūSeries receivers yet, so we may never know if it passes through.
The better chance is closer. Miguel's team will be banding at the Caracas Botanical Garden, less than 8 km (5 miles) from where the bird was detected. If it's still in the area, they might recapture it. I don't know if they will, but getting to Venezuela was enough for me.
For Miguel Matta, this news is more than a connection between researchers who study Northern Waterthrushes. It speaks to a long-standing question: where do the Northern Waterthrushes found in Caracas come from, and where do they go? This detection suggests the link between the eastern United States and the waterthrushes of northern Venezuela may be closer than we understood.
In Caracas, the Botanical Garden of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) holds a patch of urban forest where Paul Schwartz showed in 1964 that Northern Waterthrushes set up winter territories and return to the same spots year after year. More than 60 years later, the species still forages for insects in the leaf litter there. Miguel is finishing his thesis at the garden, studying the body condition and migratory connectivity of these birds, and there are more stories to come.
Schwartz, P. 1964. The Northern Waterthrush in Venezuela. Living Bird 3:169-184.
About the birds, and not
Is this groundbreaking? Is it going to change the way we think about Northern Waterthrush? Perhaps not.
As Coach Bennett likes to say, it's about the run, but it's also not about the run. This is about the birds, but it's also not about the birds. It's about the connections between countries, and between people who are trying to learn how these birds migrate, what they need, and how we can protect them.
Northern Waterthrushes spend most of the year on their wintering grounds in the tropics. They need specific habitat on their breeding grounds in the north. And every stopover in between, like the Meadows at Cape May, can decide whether a bird puts on enough fat, finds shelter and water, and makes it to the other end. Protecting them means understanding how all of those places are connected.
This fall, one waterthrush connected Cape May to Caracas and closed a loop Miguel and I started talking about in Eilat seven years ago. David Mizrahi, New Jersey Audubon and Environment for the Americas, which helped sponsor Miguel’s season on Delaware Bay, made those ties stronger this year.
About the project
The Cape May Songbird Stopover Project is a collaboration between New Jersey Audubon, Cape May Bird Observatory, The Nature Conservancy in New Jersey and Cellular Tracking Technologies, in partnership with Birds Canada and Motus. Birds are banded and tagged at the banding station in The Nature Conservancy's South Cape May Meadows Preserve by New Jersey Audubon and the field researchers they hire each autumn. If you would like to support this project, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to New Jersey Audubon and let them know you'd like it to support the Cape May Songbird Stopover Project.
Miguel Matta is a biologist and a master’s student in ecology in the Laboratory of Bird Biology and Conservation at the Institute of Ecology and Tropical Zoology (IZET), Faculty of Sciences, Central University of Venezuela (UCV). He is also the Latin America coordinator for World Migratory Bird Day at Environment for the Americas and volunteers building a network of Motus stations in Venezuela.
Special thanks to both Dr. Mizrahi and Miguel Matta for providing contributions and feedback to this piece.