For the more leisurely inclined, Antigua remains a place where there is no pressure on anyone to do anything more strenuous than count the sandpipers scampering along your balcony or feel the palm trees filter the heat of an early-evening breeze.
Most have put out snout-like siphons to feed, or rather to purge what impurities they had ingested in their adolescence on the city's tideflats.Along the strand, there are too few shorebirds: some solitary sandpipers, least timid of the waders, but that is it.
Mr Evans fears for the purple sandpipers which migrate to Amble, particularly the smaller variety from Norway, which would be the first to feel the pinch if food supplies ran thin.
Among the specialized probers (sandpipers, snipe, and allies) the upper jaw is rigidly attached to the cranium and has a mobile tip with a concentration of tactile sense organs under the rhamphotheca (the horny covering of the beak).
Sandpipers and their relatives (Scolopacidae) use their slender bills as forceps to pick up surface invertebrates or (especially in the calidridine sandpipers) for probing in mud.
Typical land and freshwater birds of the Arctic Zone are the redpoll, Lapland longspur, snowbird, wheatear, pipit, certain plovers and sandpipers, loons, rock ptarmigans, ducks, and geese.
Charadriiform (order Charadriiformes), any member of the large group of birds that includes the sandpipers, plovers, gulls, auks, and their relatives.
The first of these (the suborder Charadrii), collectively known as shorebirds or waders, includes sandpipers, plovers, lapwings, snipes, stilts, and some less-familiar forms.
Land birds include turkeys, quail, doves, eagles, hawks, owls, and most smaller birds common to the southeastern states; aquatic species such as gulls, brown pelicans, sandpipers, ospreys, and cormorants are also numerous.
Rarest are the Nordmann's greenshank, whose 1,000 surviving pairs breed on Sakhalin; the tiny but striking spoon-billed sandpiper from north-east Siberia; and the much larger black-faced spoonbill, whose population has doubled to over 2,000, thanks to better protection of its wintering sites.
But what does it mean for the Norwegian purple sandpiper?For people, sea is better without sewage.
