Three more birds tagged this spring
By Roxanne Hoorn
For the Homer Independent Press
Visitors flocked to Homer in early May for the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival, but one special attendee from last year may still be in flight, all the way from Peru.
Seymor the surfbird was one of a handful of individuals outfitted with a satellite tag during last year’s festival in hopes of shedding some light on the mysterious mating grounds of these much-loved but little-known birds.
Only one study was published on surfbird breeding grounds in the past 30 years.
“Surfbirds are one of the least studied birds in all of North America. … The species has flown under the radar in the research community,” said shorebird researcher Sam Simon, who led the satellite tracking project.
Surfbirds were the signature species of the 2025 festival, where money was raised to track eight individuals stopping over in Homer on the way to their breeding grounds.
Surfbirds spend most of their lives on coastlines. Their wintering destinations range from Kodiak to southern Chile, making some birds’ annual trips thousands of miles longer than others. When it’s time to breed, surfbirds make their way to the high alpine tundra of Alaska — a particularly tricky environment for researchers to access.
Fortunately, Homer is a popular pit stop for surfbirds and the scientists eager to study them. Simon followed the journeys of eight birds refueling in Homer in hopes of learning more about where local surfbirds go to breed as part of his master’s thesis at University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“We wanted to understand how the different nest sites in Alaska are connected to different wintering sites, so say, do all the Brooks Range birds go to California, and then all of the birds that nest in the interior near Fairbanks winter in British Columbia — or are they just sort of mixing, doing whatever they want? Is there any rhyme or reason to it?” Simon said.
The project is part of a larger surfbird study in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and others, with tracking efforts taking place across British Columbia, California, Oregon, Peru, Chile and Mexico.
Ahead of the 2025 Shorebird Festival, George Matz, coordinator of the Kachemak Bay Birders Shorebird Monitoring Group, reached out to Simon, who was researching surfbird breeding grounds near Fairbanks. Over the years, the monitoring group had developed its own insights and curiosities into the far-flung lives of surfbirds, and Matz thought the groups might be able to help each other.
Kachemak Bay Birders and the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival came together, with help from the Homer community, to raise money for several tags for surfbirds stopping over in Kachemak Bay.
“The Homer people really stepped up last year, which allowed us to capture and tag more birds,” Matz said. “The community really supports the Shorebird Festival, and having a project like this really adds to that interest.”
Aiding in research added a new dimension to the festival, said Marcy Melville, the event’s coordinator and a program manager for the Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges.
“A lot of events at the Shorebird Festival are scientific, but we’ve never used the funds from it to actually fund science on birds, so that was really cool,” she said. “People really took to it — they liked being able to be a part of new science.”
The bird monitoring program’s years of observation were put to good use, helping researchers pinpoint exactly when and where they could find birds. When they did, the researchers gently shuffled flocks — in a process Simon called “twinkling” — toward delicate leg lassos laid out on the beach. Each bird was then outfitted with a geolocator tag, much like a miniature bird backpack. At less than 5 grams, lighter than a nickel, the tags are about 3% of the birds’ body weight and do not negatively affect them, Simon assured.
Unlike leg bands that require recapture, these transmitters work with satellites and solar panels, allowing them to be tracked and recharged anywhere, even on remote mountaintops.
“We learned things we just wouldn’t know with observation,” Matz said. “By having a satellite tag, you can see where they’re going all the time.”
Each tag came with a name chosen by the 2025 festival’s junior birders: Grandpa Paul, Bat Man, Kelly Slater and Polar Bear, to name a few. Eager to follow the birds’ progress, donors and curious community members awaited regular updates on their travels.
Some of the first findings came before the birds even left the bay. The tag maps showed Cohen Island and 60-Foot Rock were popular stops for feeding and roosting.
As the birds began to leave town, even Simon and Matz were surprised by what they saw: The birds were all headed to different destinations.
“The map looks like a fan,” Simon said. “They went to wildly different places.”
One flew to the Kuskokwim Mountains, two stayed on the Seward Peninsula, and the rest flew to the Brooks Range, with some going north and others staying in the foothills closer to the Kobuk. One bird even flew to the Brooks Range and immediately turned around.
“It was there for less than 12 hours, decided ‘Nope, way too snowy’ and flew right back to Cook Inlet in less than a day,” Simon said.
After a bit more time for snow to melt, the bird returned to the same spot to nest.
While the new tags yielded exciting results, not all of them made it through the season. Simon said some likely fell off or had solar panels covered by molted feathers, while other birds may not have survived to the next season.
The bird with the longest-standing tag is Seymor, who was last located in mid-April while making the journey back from a surprising location: Chile. One of Homer’s very own surfbirds appears to prefer wintering more than 7,000 miles away in South America. The bird appeared to be heading north again, passing through Mexico. Simon said there is still a chance the tag could come back online, but in a report on the Kachemak Bay Birders email listserv, as of May 18 Seymor’s tag quit transmitting.
In early Mary during the Shorebird Festival, Simon and his adviser, Rick Lanctot, the Alaska Shorebird coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, along with Matz, twinkled and tagged three more surfbirds. Wherever they go, Homer’s birders will be eagerly watching.
In the May 18 report, one of those three birds, Frodo, has headed east across Prince William Sound, another, Kylon, has headed north on the Kenai Peninsula, and a third, Legolas, has headed west towards the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
While it is exciting to follow the birds’ travels, Simon ultimately hopes the research can help protect surfbirds and the fragile ecosystems they rely on. Surfbirds are not listed as endangered or threatened — yet.
“We don’t have the data to list them, but we don’t actually really know… A lot of other shorebird species are showing really steep declines, so there’s pretty good reason to think that they might be threatened in the future,” Simon said.
He warned that rising sea levels are disrupting coastal foraging grounds, while changing climates are shifting tundra ecosystems and potentially impacting the birds’ niche breeding grounds.
“I like to think of this as getting ahead of the curve a bit,” he said. “So they’re not listed yet, but if we need to jump into motion and do some conservation actions in the next decade or so, when we do realize they might be in trouble, we have the first steps in place.”
If you’re looking to see surfbirds around town, they’re stocky, mottled-brown shorebirds about the size of a large russet potato, as Simon described them. You may know them by their elaborate mating displays.
“Surfbirds do this aerial mating display where they fly super high in these big circles and belt out their song, which sounds crazy… There’s nothing I can even compare it to,” Simon said.
Conveniently aligned with the Shorebird Festival, the birds can be found on local rocky coastlines in April and May. While they’ve been historically common to see on the spit, they seem to be favoring off shore spots like 60-Foot-Rock, Cohen Island and Gull Island lately, Matz said.
Leave a Reply