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interested in seeing thesis and dissertation defense seminars from our students?

Check out our YouTube channel HERE

New Paper Alert!

“Red Knot (Calidris canutus rufa) prey selection in Virginia during spring migration” - link to full article in bio.

📷’s by co-author, @kristy_goes_on_adventures

💫 Undergraduate research spotlight

Two of our phenomenal undergraduate students, Lucy and Ezra, presented their research at undergraduate research symposiums on Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus! @vt_cnre

Lucy started with our lab as a @va

New paper alert!

Two papers, actually.

Check out the two most recent publications from our Fire Island project!

In Wails et al. 2025, we contrasted how red fox and free-roaming cat activity correlates with the survival of federally threatened p

A moment of appreciate for science and art!

Today, members of our lab visited Leo’s Love Letters to Nature, an exhibit in Virginia Tech’s Perspective Gallery that showcases the work of VT Shorebirds lab member, Leo Hoffman!

Leo worked

Big plover fans here. ❤️

We’re so happy to be celebrating plovers and our community at the Atlantic Coast Piping Plover and Least Tern Workshop at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, WV. It is so good to be with current

Interested in working with a fun team of researchers on the Virginia coast this year? We’re hiring!

We are looking to hire two (2) full-time field technicians to assist with a research project on migratory shorebird ecology during the spring

“PYL” was spotted 12/31/24 on Love Beach in the Bahamas by Mark Knaus. This piping plover was banded 6/25/23 as a nesting adult on Ocracoke Island @CapeHatterasNPS.

📷: Mark Knaus

Another year is done for our long-term monitoring of migratory shorebirds during spring migration on the Virginia Coast!

Our team has been monitoring red knots and other migratory species such as dunlin and sanderling, on the Virginia barrier islan

Successful trapping day! #newbling

All piping plovers handled and banded with appropriate permits.

Newly minted, Dr. Samantha Robinson’s @robinsonsgrace Defense Seminar is on our YouTube channel for you to watch. https://youtu.be/OtAK8Qsj9EY Also, tune in tomorrow for Katie Walker’s @kwalkamole defense - information on our last post.

Join us virtually next Tuesday as Katie Walker @kwalkamole defends her thesis dealing with habitat selection and post-fledging survival of piping plovers on Long Island. https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/513680601

‪Join us via zoom this Thursday as @robinsonsgrace defends her dissertation. You can watch remotely: https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/887646277 and as always, you can find all of our program’s defenses online https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEcG

Our team is in Panama City, Panama this week for the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Group meeting. We will be presenting the results from our studies throughout North America and the Caribbean. #WHSG2019

Another Fire Island season in the books 📸: Nick Giordano

We teamed up with @gadnrcoastal and over 20 volunteers to corral and band over 2200 Royal Tern chicks last weekend. We are studying their survival, movement, and eventual recruitment through out the annual cycle and across the hemisphere. We expect r

On Fire Island, chick season heated up fast - literally and figuratively. 🔥🐣 With a substantial increase in the local piping plover population, we are appreciative of our 2019 crews who have kept busy monitoring nests, rounding up chicks, and obser

Another fantastic day on the North slope. We were helping @usfws biologists place gps transmitters on a host of shorebird species. They are studying the movements and migration of these species to further our understanding and our ability to conserve

We are fortunate to be teaming with @USFWS biologists for their long term shorebird monitoring project in Utqiagvik, Alaska. @akwildfaye is representing our team and is starting her MSc. project studying Dunlin mate and site fidelity, and working wit

Our team spent the day out on Smith Island on the eastern shore of Virginia today. We are working with scientists with @nature_org, #VDGIF, and @nationalparkservice to study local productivity and regional movements of threatened piping plovers betwe

It’s hard to believe it’s that time of year, but we have piping plover chicks up and down the Atlantic Flyway. Please remember to share the beach this coming Memorial Day Weekend. All tagging and handling of plover chicks by our teams is

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