Join us in celebration of World Migratory Bird Day by watching the PBS Nature documentary, Crash: A Tale of Two Species (53 minutes, not rated). We'll provide a light lunch. After the movie, we'll have a short discussion about the current state of horseshoe crabs, red knots, and other migrating birds. 

With its armored shell, ancient anatomy, and 450-million-year lineage, the horseshoe crab almost seems too inconspicuous to stir up controversy. Yet this humble creature is at the very center of a collision between three completely different species.

For many decades, humans have harvested the horseshoe crab for use as fishing bait. Since the 1970s, we have also used horseshoe crab blood for medical purposes. But we may have gone too far. Horseshoe crab numbers have declined significantly since the early 1990’s. And, naturally, so did their egg numbers.

This is especially important to a small shorebird that is a global traveler of the most impressive kind. The red knot makes one of the longest migrations of any animal — a journey that takes it from one end of the earth to the other. To accomplish this feat, it relies on the eggs of the horseshoe crab. Without these eggs, the red knot is in danger.

In the film Crash: A Tale of Two Species, filmmaker Allison Argo tells the story of nature’s amazing ability to create fragile connections among the most unexpected creatures, and of our potential as humans to destroy those connections — or restore them.

This program is part of our week long celebration of World Migratory Bird Day. World Migratory Bird Day is a biannual global campaign celebrated on the second Saturday in May and October to highlight the need for conserving migratory birds and their habitats.

This program is supported by Flight Path, the first campaign of the Spark of Science@ My Library initiative, which focuses on the science of birds and migration.