Thank you son (Chris Ordiway) and everyone else for helping the horseshoe crabs.  I was in DE from May 7 - 12 and at least 3 times a day I made trips to Port Mahon and flipped crabs.  I have no idea how many it may have totaled but I did as Chris mentioned, spent hours trying to help them.  Without these incredible resources we will not have the REKN and RUTU to enjoy. I love all forms of nature and this is just a small thing I can do to help and you can too.  Also remember many of the crabs have been tagged and you can contact those who keep track of their movement also which is another way to help. I also looked for tagged birds and passed the tag colors and numbers on to Chris for tracking purposes.  I saw a gull with a bright pink tag with A5 on it attached to each of it's wings.  Seems the bird was tagged in Canada so I passed on the time and dates I observed it at Port Mahon to the project people in Canada.
  
Happy Birding,
Patricia Viola Rose
Callaway, St Mary's County Maryland
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Maryland Birds & Birding [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ole Buck
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 4:02 PM
To: 
Subject: Re: [MDOSPREY] Horseshoe Crabs (slightly off topic)

Thanks for bringing this up Bob. Each spring I spend a few days helping 
the DE Shorebird Project with catching, banding or resighting shorebirds 
(RUTU, REKN especially) and always get up to enjoy the sunrise over the 
Bay each morning. I spend a few minutes flipping any crabs I find in a 
hundred stretch of beach in front of the research house on Slaughter 
Beach. I do usually see others flipping crabs but it's more often a 
beach homeowner than a birder. In the last five years I know I've 
flipped several thousand crabs and know that the effort is appreciated 
by the crabs and the birds, even if they can't say so. The best 
flipper-over I know is my Mom, who will spend HOURS returning crabs to 
the water at Port Mahon where they get trapped in the rocks at high 
tide. Most of us will nurse the bird that crashes into the kitchen 
window or stop to move the turtle out of the road so there's no excuse 
not to take a few minutes to return some crabs to the water. If we want 
to keep seeing them and the birds that depend on them we need to do our 
part to conserve a resource that's valuable to the world and to our 
favorite past time.

Good birding all,
Chris Ordiway
Accokeek, MD

Bob Mumford wrote:
> Like Harry Armistead and others, I was over at Slaughter Beach, DE, on  
> Wednesday and noted the large numbers of stranded horseshoe crabs.