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The Animal Demography Unit (ADU) launched the Coordinated Waterbird Counts (CWAC) project in 1992 as part South Africa’s commitment to International waterbird conservation. This is being done by means of a programme of regular mid-summer and mid-winter censuses at a large number of South African wetlands. Regular six-monthly counts are regarded as a minimum standard; however, we do encourage counters to survey their wetlands on a more regular basis as this provides more accurate data. All the counts are conducted by volunteers; people and organisations with a passion for waterbird conservation. It is one of the largest and most successful citizen science programmes in Africa, providing much needed data for waterbird conservation around the world. Currently the project regularly monitors over 400 wetlands around the country, and furthermore curates waterbird data for over 600 sites.
Jeroen Reneerkens is a postdoc at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Among his responsibilities is the coleadership of the Sanderling Project of the International Wader Study Group. This projects aims to learn more about the migration routes, phenology and population dynamics (survival and recruitment) of Sanderlings in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Jeroen reports: "I've just received this photo of a female Sanderling. She was observed yesterday [15 May 2012] in North Bay, South Uist in Scotland. The photograph was taken by Craig Round. We caught and ringed her on 8 July 2003 as an adult in Zackenberg, in northeastern Greenland. I was with Theunis Piersma then as his PhD student, and it was my first time doing fieldwork in the arctic at Zackenberg. I added the colour-ring combination, six years later, in the 2009 breeding season. Her clutches hatched successfully both in 2003 and in 2009.
"She was observed in Walvis Bay, Namibia, on 11 and 13 December 2009 by Mark Boorman. If she, as most Sanderlings are, is faithful to her non-breeding area, she has flown at least 230 000 km in her life already! Amazing animals!"
Yesterday was mid-May, so this bird would have been on passage through Scotland during its migration back to Greenland, to arrive around the end of the month. Ring recoveries show that most of the Sanderling that spend the non-breeding season in South Africa and Namibia breed in Siberia in northern Russia. It is a comparatively recent finding that some unknown proportion of them turn west when they reach Europe and migrate to breed in Greenland.
Mark Boorman is an active SAFRING ringer, based in Swakopmund. All of us can keep a sharp lookout for birds of many species with colour rings and report them to SAFRING.
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Magda Remisiewicz was a postdoc in the ADU for three years, 2008–2010. She now has an academic post at the University of Gdansk in Poland, and is part of a research group there with which the ADU collaborates on studies of waders and seabirds. One of Magda's focuses while she was in South Africa was collecting data on a neglected aspect of moult studies, that of inland (as opposed to coastal) waders, and she did a lot of her fieldwork at the Barberspan Bird Sanctuary in North West Province. Moult, and especially moult of the primaries, is a key component of the annual cycle of birds – essentially they are replacing their means of locomotion. Studies in the ADU have demonstrated that moult lends itself to quantitative analysis and have demonstrated links between the timing of moult and climate. So, in an era of climate change, moult studies represent an important tool for measuring its impact on birds. The photo shows the 10 primary feathers of a Wood Sandpiper. The three outer feathers are old, worn and faded, waiting to be replaced. The six inner primaries are new (and so is one secondary). The seventh primary is about half grown.
This is the first review of the moult of migrant waders since 1979. Tony Prater, one of the early leaders in wader studies, presented this review at a conference held in Cape Town that year, called "Birds of the Sea and Shore."
Remisiewicz, M. 2011. The flexibility of primary moult in relation to migration in Palaearctic waders – an overview. Wader Study Group Bulletin 118: 163–174.
ABSTRACT: This paper presents an overview of patterns in the primary moult of waders using the Eurasian–African migration system and updates earlier summaries with results obtained from the Underhill-Zucchini moult models (1988, 1990). Recent applications of these models allow researchers to examine moult timing down to the progress of an individual feather in a tract and to determine the effects of environmental factors on moult. Waders present a wide variety of inter- and intra-specific strategies for their primary moult, an energy-costly activity they must fit in with breeding and migration, the other main energy-demanding events in their life cycle. Here I present the moult strategies of waders in the context of their age, size, sex and annual variation in breeding success, seasonal food abundance, the latitude where they moult, the distance they migrate, the habitats they use, and the rainfall patterns and temperatures at their moulting grounds. I also discuss how moult is adjusted to these factors. This overview emphasises the flexibility of many waders’ moult strategies as an adaptation to the unpredictable food supply provided by ephemeral inland wetlands and compares these 
strategies with those of populations that use predictable coastal habitats. Discovering the mechanisms that allow waders to adjust their genetically controlled and hormonally regulated moult to proximate factors is suggested as one of the challenges in further studies of moult.
The Wader Study Group Bulletin is published by the Internatonal Wader Study Group. The IWSG consists of both professionals and amateurs, worldwide, who do research on waders. It holds an annual conference, characterised by good science, good conservation, and good fun. Presentations range from local studies of waders to extensive, long-term studies aiming at a deeper understanding of spectacular wader phenomena like long-distance migration, living in extreme environments and variable reproductive strategies. This year's conference will be held in Séné, Golfe du Morbihan, France, between 21–24 September 2012.
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Colin Jackson is a Kenyan citizen, born in Eldoret, Kenya. He completed a BSc (Hons) in Environmental Science at the University of Southampton, UK. After doing a research project on Kentish Plovers in Portugal, he returned home to Kenya to work as a Research Scientist in the Ornithology Department of the National Museums of Kenya, in Nairobi. He initiated the Nairobi Ringing Group has trained more than 100 Kenyans in bird ringing techniques. He is an expert on how to set about the ageing and sexing of African passerines; he is regularly called upon to give talks to groups of ringers about how to age and sex a "bird-in-the-hand".
In 1998 Colin moved to Watamu on the north Kenyan coast to set up an A Rocha Kenya project which focuses on biodiversity conservation through three programmes: research, environmental education and community conservation. Watumu is adjacent to Kenya's leading coastal wader hotspot, Mida Creek, and Colin started counting and ringing waders there in 1998. This has led to his research project looking at three species of wader for which little is known of the East African populations: Lesser Sand Plover, Greater Sand Plover and Terek Sandpiper. Besides his own Kenyan data, Colin will undertake analyses of data from the opposite side of the Indian Ocean, from north-western Australia. His cosupervisor is Dr Clive Minton, one of the initiators of the Australasian Wader Studies Group. Colin registered for an MSc at UCT last year, and at the beginning of the 2012 academic year this has been upgraded to a PhD.
Colin's studies are supported by the Leventis Conservation Foundation.
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