SACKVILLE, NB — Biology Department Head Dr. Diana Hamilton and Julie Paquet from the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) have teamed up to co-chair the 10th Western Hemisphere Shorebird Group meeting, along with a committee and team of volunteers, at Mount Allison University from August 11-16, 2024. The pair have a longstanding research partnership that has involved Mount Allison students joining forces with government biologists to study shorebird ecology in Canada and abroad.

“We have an exciting week of talks, posters, workshops, side meetings, and field trips planned,” says Hamilton. “It is a wonderful opportunity for our organization to gather during the period of peak shorebird migration in the region.”

The main meeting of shorebird biologists in the hemisphere meets every second year, rotating between North, South, and Central America. Approximately 260 attendees from academia, government, and conservation-oriented NGOs will attend the meetings from twenty countries, with an additional 30 or more attending virtually from around the world. All presentations will be live streamed, with simultaneous translation between English and Spanish for both in person and online participants.

Hamilton says Mount Allison is the ideal spot to host this conference at this time of year as attendees can stay on campus in residence and have easy access to birding opportunities in the Waterfowl Park and other local areas, as well as have a chance to visit the nearby critical feeding and resting sites for the shorebirds that fly through the Bay of Fundy on their fall migration.

During the week, all attendees will be heading to the nearby Johnson’s Mills Shorebird Interpretive Centre, run by the Nature Conservancy of Canada, to see tens of thousands of semipalmated sandpipers using the Bay of Fundy during their southbound migration. Hundreds of thousands of semipalmated sandpipers feed on these mudflats during peak migration in mid-August. The best time to see the birds is two hours before, to two hours after high tide.

For more details on the conference, visit whsg2024.com. 

Photo credit: Brennan Obermayer