A SUB-SPECIES of a small shorebird spends much of the northern winter feeding at Roebuck Bay and Eighty Mile Beach in the Kimberley.

The red knot sub-species (Calidris canutus piersmai) breeds in the Siberian Arctic tundra, and travels to and from the Kimberley via China’s Yellow Sea—a round trip of at least 20,000km.

PhD student Ying Chi Chan is one of a group of Netherlands-based scientists conducting detailed longitudinal studies of shorebirds’ flight paths and foraging ecology.

“Habitat destruction is happening in a lot of places but the rate is particularly fast in China,” she says.

“The main thing I want to know is how the bird adapts to this change in environments.”

When I wrote this piece I was unaware of the Wilson Inlet (Denmark WA)’s importance to this intrepid little traveller.

Science Network WA [read this story]