The western hemisphere's largest winter population of red knot shorebirds in Chile held steady around its all-time low of 17,000 birds for the third year in a row, evidence that red knots will remain perilously close to extinction on their migrations through New Jersey, state wildlife biologists said today.

The numbers observed in Tierra Del Fuego at the tip of South America this winter followed a trend predicted several years ago by shorebird expert Allan Baker of the Royal Ontario Museum, when he plotted an "extinction curve'' showing the birds could die out after 2010, biologist Amanda Dey of the state Division of Fish and Wildlife said.

"So things aren't looking too good for the red knot,'' said Dey, who heads an effort by the division's endangered species program to track shorebirds as they land along Delaware Bay every spring to feed on horseshoe crab eggs. "The crab population will come back,'' Dey told the division's annual confe rence for outdoor writers at its central offices.

"But it won't come back fast enough to bring the bay back to what it was.'' In bay waters, biological surveys show increasing numbers of juvenile horseshoe crabs, said Peter Himchak, a biologist with the division's marine fisheries administration. But the crabs take a long time to reach reproductive age -- as long as eight or nine years -- so it could be another decade before the crabs return in the huge numbers that thronged bay beaches in the 1980s, he said.

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