Each Foundation document is a substantive standalone read. Read them in order or pick the one that interests you most — Doc 4 (the birds), Doc 5 (the tide), Doc 6 (the citizen-science context). All three are part of the FSB Background Reading Series, written in the program's voice.
Foundation Pathway · Doc 4 · ~25 min read
Who's Who on the Mudflats ● Available
Thirty-two migratory and sixteen resident shorebird species use Moreton Bay across the year. A Steward does not need to identify every species in the field — but the seven or eight a Steward will see most often, and the four or five that carry the heaviest conservation weight, need to be recognisable on sight.
The species a Steward must know
Moreton Bay's shorebird fauna divides into three working groups for a Steward. The flagship migrants are the long-distance birds the program exists to defend: Bar-tailed Godwit (Limosa lapponica baueri — the subspecies tracked on this site, including B6), Eastern Curlew (Numenius madagascariensis, Critically Endangered under EPBC), Great Knot (Calidris tenuirostris, Critically Endangered), Red Knot (Calidris canutus), and Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus). The resident standards are present year-round and provide the visual baseline for any roost: Pied Oystercatcher, Sooty Oystercatcher, Red-capped Plover, Masked Lapwing, and Bush Stone-curlew. The sympatric mid-distance migrants share the migrant flocks but are easier on the field eye: Greenshank, Marsh Sandpiper, Common Sandpiper, Grey-tailed Tattler, and Red-necked Stint.
What the Steward is looking for
The literacy this document builds is not a field guide. It is the ability to read a roost — to see, in a 30-second scan, what species are present, in what proportions, and in what behavioural state. A flock of 200 godwits, 40 knots and a single Eastern Curlew is a different management problem from a flock of 200 godwits, 40 knots and forty Eastern Curlews. The number of curlews is the part of the count that decides the bird-first recommendation. A Steward who cannot tell a curlew from a godwit at 40 metres cannot make that call.
The four conservation tiers
| Tier | Species at Moreton Bay | What carries the weight |
|---|
| Critically Endangered (EPBC) | Eastern Curlew, Great Knot, baueri Bar-tailed Godwit, Curlew Sandpiper | Population-level harm. A flush event during fuelling carries categorically higher weight. |
| Endangered (EPBC) | Bar-tailed Godwit (menzbieri), Lesser Sand Plover | Listed but with regional buffers. Weight scales with proportion of flock. |
| Vulnerable (EPBC) | Red Knot, Greater Sand Plover | Trajectory is the key. Recent data shapes recommendation. |
| Not listed | Most resident shorebirds, common migrants | Disturbance still recorded. Site-fidelity is the conservation argument. |
How to read this document
Read it once early in the program. Re-read the species accounts for the flagship migrants the week before your first field trip. Bring it back out on the morning of any roost visit where you expect Eastern Curlew or Great Knot — the species that anchor the bird-first record. Pair it with the Birds page on this site, where each species has a photographed identification panel and a short ecology note.
Companion materials on FSB
The Birds page provides the photographed reference for each species. The BirdLife Australia Shorebird ID Booklet (PDF, V3.1) is the recommended print field reference and is free to download — order a hard copy for your field bag from shorebirds@birdlife.org.au. For deeper Moreton Bay specifics, see Coleman & Milton's site fidelity work in the Australia cluster below.
Foundation Pathway · Doc 5 · ~20 min read
The Tidal Cycle ● Available
Roosts are tidal phenomena. A Steward who does not understand the tide cannot understand what they are seeing on the mudflat — when the birds will be there, when they will be feeding, and when a disturbance event carries its highest cost.
The cycle, simply
Moreton Bay is a semi-diurnal tidal system: two highs and two lows in roughly twenty-five hours, with the inter-tide period averaging about six hours and twelve minutes. The vertical range varies through the lunar month between spring tides (around new and full moon, larger range) and neap tides (around first and last quarter, smaller range). Practically, this means that for any visit, two things are knowable from the tide chart and matter for a Steward's planning: the time of high water (when the roost is in use) and the height of high water (which determines whether the roost is fully covered or partially exposed).
What the birds are doing at each phase
| Tide phase | What the birds do | What a Steward observes |
|---|
| Low water | Spread across exposed intertidal flats, foraging individually or in small loose groups | The roost is empty. Counts are difficult — birds are dispersed across kilometres of flat. |
| Mid-flood | Beginning to consolidate as feeding flats are progressively covered | Birds visible streaming toward roost. Counting becomes possible. |
| High water | Stationary on roost, alternating between rest, preen, sleep | The roost is full. Disturbance during this window costs the birds the recovery the flight depends on. |
| Mid-ebb | Beginning to disperse back to flats as substrate is uncovered | Counts still feasible, but flock breaking up. |
The two-hour disturbance window
The high-water window — roughly an hour either side of high tide — is the period when roost-level disturbance carries its highest cost. Birds at this point have committed to the site for the duration. A flush event during this window pushes them into the air at exactly the moment the metabolic budget assumes rest. They cannot simply move down the flat to feed; the flat is underwater. They must hold flight, find another roost, or burn reserves circling. The disturbance window is also the only time a roost count is possible. The competing demands — count the birds without disturbing them — are the central tension of the Steward's field practice.
How to read a tide chart
For Moreton Bay, the Bureau of Meteorology publishes daily tide predictions for tide stations including Brisbane Bar (the bay's reference station), Cleveland (mid-bay), Bongaree (Bribie), Tangalooma (Moreton Island), and Jacobs Well. The Cleveland station is the closest publicly-published reference for most BIEPA sites; Bongaree is the Bribie reference for Kakadu Beach. Time corrections for specific roosts are local and accumulate against the Brisbane Bar reference. Heights in metres, times in AEST. For field planning: aim to arrive at the roost about 60–90 minutes before predicted high water, allow the flock to settle, conduct your count near the peak, and remain still through the first 30 minutes of ebb.
Spring versus neap tides — when which roost works
A roost site that holds birds at high tide on a neap may be wholly covered on a spring. The reverse is also true: a roost that holds birds on a small spring may be too exposed for safe roosting on a low neap. This is part of why a single site does not support a flock through the whole season — the birds work a network of roosts, and the configuration of which sites are used on which day shifts with the lunar cycle. The Steward learns this by watching it.
Companion materials on FSB
The ShorelineWatch wizard captures the tide phase at the time of each observation; FlagWatch records the tide explicitly as part of the assessment. For Kakadu Beach specifically, the BSWG Shorebird Working Group analysis (held in the program record) maps the roost surface against tide heights — useful when planning a visit at any extreme of the tide cycle.
Foundation Pathway · Doc 6 · ~22 min read
Citizen Science and the Shorebird Steward ● Available
Most of what is known about EAAF shorebird populations comes from volunteers — and the credibility of that knowledge depends on how the data are collected. A Steward sits inside a long tradition of careful field observation, and the value of a Steward's record depends on it being part of the same tradition.
The three datasets a Steward's records connect to
Three long-running programs sit underneath the EAAF population science. The Australasian Wader Studies Group (AWSG) has run shorebird counts in Australia since 1981, including the bi-annual National Shorebird Counts (November and February) and the targeted research counts that produce the data feeding most peer-reviewed Australian shorebird papers. The Queensland Wader Study Group (QWSG) is the Moreton Bay arm — its decades-long count series is the baseline against which any change at any bay site is measured. Stewards' field records do not replace either dataset but feed alongside it: site-condition assessments and disturbance records are the gap that the count data alone cannot fill.
The third dataset is BirdLife Australia's Birdata portal — Australia's longest-running digital bird database with over 30 million records across all bird species. The Australian Shorebird Monitoring Project, run from BirdLife, uses Birdata as its substrate. A site that appears in QWSG counts also appears in Birdata; the systems are connected.
What makes a Steward's record useful
Three things, in order: provenance, repeatability, and signed attribution. Provenance means knowing where the record came from and being able to trace it back to the conditions under which it was made — date, time, observer, tide, weather, the specific site. ShorelineWatch and FlagWatch capture these as required fields. Repeatability means another observer with the same training, at the same site, on the same conditions, would produce a similar record. The Steward training is the standardisation. Signed attribution means the observer puts their name to the record. A bird-first record is more useful when it is read by people who can ask the observer follow-up questions; an anonymous record carries less weight.
How citizen science scales to peer-reviewed science
The chain runs in three steps. Volunteer counts at sites generate site-level data — what species, how many, when. Aggregated across sites and seasons, this becomes regional and national data — the Studds et al. (2017) flyway-wide analysis used twenty years of AWSG counts at hundreds of sites. The aggregated data feeds back into management decisions — which sites to protect, where conservation funding goes, which species require intervention. Without the bottom of that chain, the top does not exist. The papers in the Yellow Sea cluster of the Research Library below all rest on count datasets that were, at the bottom, individual people standing on individual flats and writing down individual numbers.
What this means for the Steward's day
Every record matters less than its place in a series, and every series matters less than the whole. A single ShorelineWatch record from a single morning is one observation. Six months of weekly records from a single Steward at a single site is a dataset. Three years of records from twenty Stewards across the bay is a regional argument. The Steward's job is not to produce the dataset alone — it is to add the day's contribution, accurately and on time, to a record that long predates them and will continue long after.
Companion materials on FSB
The Great Gamble page draws directly on the kinds of long-running count datasets described here. The Our Results page is the program's own contribution to the broader citizen science record — a Steward's field records appear there alongside everyone else's. For the deeper background on monitoring methodology, the BirdLife Monitoring summary in the Australia cluster below outlines how the National Shorebird Monitoring Program is structured.