This is Bird Note.

The Red Knot is a chunky shore bird no bigger than a robin with one of the longest migrations in the animal kingdom.

Every year, some of these birds travel around 9,000 miles from the Arctic tundra, to Tierra of

the Tierra del Fuego in South America.

This epic journey depends on a critical stop oversight, the Delaware Bay. Here, hungry red knots arrive in droves each spring,

timing their visit perfectly to the spawning of horseshoe crabs.

The craft's tiny greenish eggs are an energy-packed meal,

just what the birds need to refuel for the next leg of their journey.

But after decades of over-harvesting for bait and medical use,

horseshoe crab numbers plummeted by nearly 80%. That has meant fewer eggs for the exhausted red knots.

But there's hope. In 2013, fisheries managers in the U.S.

banned the harvest of female horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay to take pressure

off the crabs and the birds who rely on them. And in 2025,

those protections were renewed. Horseshoe crabs in the Delaware region are at an all-time high

since 2003, and red-knot populations across the Americas have been low bit stable since 2011.

Protecting key stop oversights

and managing fisheries sustainably

are just some of the ways

we can help migratory birds

like the Red Knot

complete their cross-continent marathon

each spring.

...