World Shorebirds Day falls on Sunday, September 6, and the count it anchors is already running. The Global Shorebird Counts run September 1 to 7, and birdwatchers worldwide are counting at local sites and submitting the results to eBird.
The day is the midpoint, not the deadline
World Shorebirds Day has been marked on September 6 since the project was established in 2014 by Gyorgy Szimuly, a birder and writer based in Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom. The counts wrap a full week around it.
The organizers published this year’s call on August 31. Participation is open to experienced birders, researchers, photographers, students, community groups, and people who have never knowingly looked at a sandpiper.
The instruction is short. Visit a site, count the shorebirds you find, submit the checklist to eBird, and share it with the username WorldShorebirdsDay. There is no fee and no equipment requirement beyond whatever you already own.
Why the organizers want your zero counts
One line in the announcement runs against instinct. “Some sites will hold thousands of birds; others only a handful. At some, there may be none on the day of the count. They all belong in the record.”
People who arrive at an empty estuary tend to go home without filing anything, which quietly tilts the record toward the good days at the good sites. An empty mudflat in September is a fact about that mudflat, and it only becomes visible if somebody writes it down.
World Shorebirds Day is equally direct that the counts are not a formal scientific census. The stated aim is to encourage participation in monitoring and to build a record that gains value as the same people return to the same places year after year. Checklists submitted through eBird then feed the wider research and conservation work that platform already supports.
The numbers behind the week
The 2025 State of the Birds report places shorebirds in the worst position of any North American bird group. It records definitive negative population trends for 19 of 28 shorebird species since 1980, with 18 species losing ground faster in recent years than they were before.
The same report counts 19 shorebird Tipping Point species, more than any other group of birds on the continent, and locates the steepest losses at migratory staging sites on the Atlantic Coast between North Carolina and Nova Scotia, and along the Gulf Coast.
It is not uniformly bleak. The American Oystercatcher Recovery Initiative, launched in 2009 and led by Manomet Conservation Sciences across 16 Atlantic and Gulf states, is credited in that report with a 43% increase in the regional breeding population and an estimate of more than 14,000 birds by 2023.
You do not need a coast
“Shorebird” is a misleading label, and the organizers spend some effort saying so. They point to the Northern Lapwing, which depends on inland grassland, farmland mosaics and seasonal wetlands, and to the Eurasian Stone-curlew, which lives on dry grassland, steppe and open riverbeds far from any tide.
The counts treat observations from reservoirs, rice fields, inland mudflats, saltmarshes and small local wetlands exactly as they treat those from internationally recognized sites. A flooded field on a farm track is a legitimate place to stand and count.
If you keep birds at home, plan the trip back
This is the part that touches companion bird owners directly. The CDC lists shorebirds, naming plovers and sandpipers, among the wild aquatic birds that act as natural reservoirs for avian influenza A viruses, alongside ducks, geese, swans, gulls and terns.
Most of those viruses are low-pathogenic and cause few or no signs of illness in the wild birds carrying them, which is the reassuring half of the picture. The half that matters at your own front door is the agency’s other statement: infected birds shed virus in saliva, nasal secretions and feces, and susceptible birds can pick it up from contaminated surfaces.
The sensible response is not to skip the count. It is to leave the boots you wore on the mudflat outside and wash your hands before you open a cage. For the fuller version, here is the seven-day routine that tightens a bird room’s hygiene without turning the house upside down. Anything that looks like illness in your own bird belongs in front of an avian vet.
September is a hard month for migrants generally
The shorebirds being counted this week are one part of a much larger movement, and the most common way an ordinary house harms a migrating bird is through its windows. Cornell’s BirdCast opened its fall Lights Out window on August 15, and most collisions turn out to happen in daylight rather than at night.
If your glass is a problem, the remedies are a short and testable list rather than a matter of taste. Start with the glass treatments that actually stop collisions, and skip the ones that only look as though they should work.
Where to go from here
Participation details, including how to tell the organizers where you will be counting, sit on the project’s Global Shorebird Counts page. If you have never filed an eBird checklist, this is a forgiving week to start, because a short list from a small wetland is precisely what the organizers say they are asking for.
Counting is one way to take part. Building habitat is another, and the logic behind both is the same: choose a local place and commit to it across years rather than an afternoon. That is what 120 swift boxes in West Yorkshire were put up to prove.
The count closes on Monday, September 7. After that, the useful move is to write the same site into your calendar for next September, because the value of a checklist is mostly in the one that follows it.
Featured image: a flock of dunlin lifting off after a migration stopover at Colonel Samuel Smith Park in Toronto, photographed on 22 May 2021 by Mykola Swarnyk via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped to 16:9. It is not a photograph from this year’s counts.