The Salmon Creek Unit will stay open until 8:00pm. Come for a walk along the Shorebird Loop during the evening hours.
There will be a presentation at 7:00pm at the Visitor Center titled “Extravagant Ruffs: Shorebird tales from Europe” with Yvonne Verkuil.
Some of you may have seen ruffs here in Humboldt County, because they are quite common vagrants. During this presentation you will get the chance to learn a little more about them. Although the ruffs you saw were probably quite plain, ruffs are actually known for their extravagant looks. Males sport colorful ruffs and tufts in unique combinations of patterns and colors and their displays on the mating grounds are a spectacular sight.
Yvonne will dive into the more hidden complexity of their mating system, revealing equally spectacular roles for males and females. She will also go into the capacity of ruffs to react to changes in their environments. They appear quickly in areas where conditions are suitable. This has led to apparent flexible usage of migration routes through Eastern and Western Europe, and large-scale shifts of breeding grounds in Scandinavia and Russia in the last decades.
Yvonne Verkuil is a Dutch ecologist, with a lifelong passion for shorebirds. Since 2022, she has been based near Humboldt Bay, and now teaches the Shorebird Class in the Wildlife Department at Cal Poly Humboldt. She has worked with shorebirds (including ruffs) at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, in a Danish-German-Dutch intertidal area called the Wadden Sea. She also did research on shorebirds in the Syvash, Ukraine (again, including ruffs). For her doctoral and postdoctoral studies, she spent a number of years at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. She dedicates her free time to promoting shorebird conservation and research, mostly through her role as journal editor of Wader Study. Besides teaching, she still works (remotely) for the University of Groningen, and does fieldwork on shorebirds and other water birds with the Lowland Ecology Network in the Netherlands