Job ten Horn

Since 2009 I’m working as a technician at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research in the Coastal Systems department. I live in the beautiful town of Oosterend on the island of Texel, close to mudflats of the Wadden Sea.

I coordinate the colour- ringing of Bar-tailed Godwits and Red knots in the Wadden Sea and on the Banc d’Arguin, Mauritania. I’m therefore involved in catching shorebirds, and I spent a lot of time on the mudflats for ring reading and sampling.

Besides the work on shorebird movements and demography, I’m working on their prey, the intertidal macro zoo benthos, as one of the team members in the SIBES project. During each summer since 2008 we sample the entirety of the intertidal mudflats of the Dutch Wadden Sea and process all these samples in our lab facility at the NIOZ. I’m also one of the experts in species identification and taxonomy of benthic species. For Dutch readers, see also Basismonitoring Wadden.

In the months of the year that Red Knots and Bar-tailed Godwits are present in the Wadden Sea, we’re catching with mistnets, on the island of Griend or the sandbank Richel which is our main research area nearby the NIOZ institute on Texel. Our fieldwork is facilitated by the NIOZ Research Vessel Navicula and the mobile bird observatory, the Wadden Potoon “De Richel” which makes our fieldwork efficient and flexible.