This page is your map. Each entry is a doorway — a fact, a paper, an opening question. The substance lives in conversation with Gazza.
Doc 4 — Who's Who on the Mudflats
Foundation Pathway · ~25 min read · FSB Background Reading Series
Thirty-two migratory and sixteen resident shorebird species share Moreton Bay across the year. A Steward doesn't need to know all forty-eight on sight — but the seven or eight you'll see most often, and the four that carry the heaviest conservation weight, must be recognisable at forty metres.
Four species at Critically Endangered (EPBC): Eastern Curlew, Great Knot, baueri Bar-tailed Godwit, Curlew Sandpiper. The number of these in your roost decides the bird-first recommendation.
Source: Doc 4 long-form on this site; the
Birds page is the photographed companion.
💬Discuss with Gazza
Doc 5 — The Tidal Cycle
Foundation Pathway · ~20 min read
Shorebirds at Moreton Bay live by the tide. Feeding on falling and rising mudflat exposure, roosting at high tide. Knowing the tidal phase decides where the birds will be, what they're doing, and whether your visit is well-timed or wasted.
The Bay's tidal range averages 1.6–2.0m — small enough that a poorly-timed visit can mean the flats are underwater (no birds feeding) or the roosts are abandoned (birds have moved with the falling water).
💬Discuss with Gazza
Doc 6 — Citizen Science and the Shorebird Steward
Foundation Pathway · ~22 min read
The data trajectory runs from individual people on individual mudflats with notebooks, up through QWSG and AWSG aggregations, into the peer-reviewed papers that drive policy. Without the bottom of that chain, the top does not exist.
Studds et al. (2017) drew on twenty years of AWSG counts at hundreds of sites — work done, in part, by people doing what you're learning to do.
💬Discuss with Gazza
Miranda Naturalists' Trust — Miranda: The Journal
Periodical · NZ · Free online at miranda.org.nz
The best example anywhere of what narrative shorebird conservation writing reads like. NZ perspective on the same species — godwits, knots, curlews — at the same end of the flyway. Readable, accurate, written by people who go to the mudflats.
The Firth of Thames count programme behind the journal is the longest community shorebird-counting record in the Southern Hemisphere — comparable in spirit to QWSG's Moreton Bay work.
💬Discuss with Gazza