With barely enough time to catch their breath after the end of turtle nesting season, volunteers from Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch and Shorebird Protection are back on the beach participating in a bird study.

"We're part of a study of red knots funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation," said Suzi Fox, director of AMITW. "We did the first of our part in the study last spring and now we're out on the beach doing the second part."

Red knots are the largest of the "peeps" on North America, and one of the most colorful. They are seen in large numbers on the north end of the Island, either migrating through or sometimes settling here for the winter.

They make one of the longest yearly migrations of any bird, traveling nearly 9,300 miles from their Arctic breeding ground to sometimes as far south as Tierra del Fuego in Southern South America.

They usually stop here for a while and feed up for the rest of their journey.

Turtle Watch is setting up on the beach near the Cypress Avenue access in Anna Maria to participate in a study to identify factors that could help ensure the survival of the red knots. The birds are disappearing in large numbers.

Volunteers will be on the beach for six hours every day this week observing the birds and then talking to stakeholders.

A stakeholder is someone who has a vested interested in a subject. In this case, it's landowners, land managers, local governments (Anna Maria city government, Manatee County), representatives of the conservation community such as Audubon and Turtle Watch and representatives of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

"Our task is to collect data through observation for the first week," Fox said. "Then during the second week, we'll devise some sort of protection for the red knots while they rest on the upper beach."

She noted that during the second week, one of her volunteers would be responsible for talking to beach goers and interviewing them when possible.

A second volunteer will be observing bird behavior, responses to disturbances and sources of things that disturb the birds.

"We're happy to be part of this study," Fox said. "It fits right into our mission as stewards of the shorebirds on Anna Maria Island."

Turtle season finale

It's all over but the final crunching of the numbers for the 2011 sea turtle nesting season.

There were a total of 8,853 hatchlings that made it into the warm waters of the Gulf.

It's estimated that only about one in a thousand sea turtle hatchlings survives to reproductive age, which loosely translated means that AMITW may be directly responsible for helping nine loggerheads navigate their natal beach on their journey to adulthood.

Sea turtles return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs. The males are only on shore once in their lives. That's when they hatch out of their nests. They do return to the offshore waters for mating purposes. Then females come back to dig their nests and lay their eggs.

The loggerheads that nest on Island beaches are a threatened species. And this year, the Island also played host to a nesting spot for an endangered green turtle.