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.