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| American Golden-Plovers |
Today started off much the same, only sparser. I saw exactly two shorebirds in the Middle Bog when I started off this morning--a Lesser Yellowlegs and a Pectoral Sandpiper, fighting each other for a square foot of shallow water. I started my figure 8 around the two drawn-down bogs. A decent amount of birds in the Lower Bog, but nothing I hadn't seen. A grazing juvenile Brown-headed Cowbird was notable only because I haven't seen cowbird this month. You know you're clutching at straws when a cowbird makes you stop.
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| Wilson's Snipe |
Completing the loop I stopped again where I started and scanned. More shorebirds had beamed down from the orbiting shorebird starship, a hodge-podge of Spotted Sandpipers, Semipalmated Plovers, Least Sandpipers...and then...BOING...American Golden-Plover! I started taking all the crummy pictures I could, both through the scope and with my slow-responding camera. Slimmer, browner, a gold/brown cap. I texted Jim and was pondering whether I should put them on the Burlco alert when I looked up and they were flying off to the north. Very much like their Black-bellied cousins, they were doing the Whitesbog touch 'n' go. Still, I had enough pictures to document the sighting and the morning had gone from dull to exciting. As I was cussing out the plovers for leaving, I looked out to area where they'd been and saw a bird with what one of my friends describes as racing stripes on its back. Its head was tucked in, but scoping it closely I saw that it was a Wilson's Snipe, not a rare bird, but a cryptic one that I come across about once a year at Whitesbog.
Even though I had just been at the Lower Bog, I felt it behooved me to check it for the plovers. Maybe they had circled around and landed in the rapidly growing grass. They weren't there. I ran into D... birding from her car. She asked me if I'd seen anything "good" and for once I was able to say yes. She thought there was the possibility of them coming back so she decided to drive back to the spot I'd been. As I was walking back my friend who is there every day, usually much earlier, drove up. "Now you come," I said. He also drove up to the parking spot the SE corner of Middle Bog.
I trudged up there, put down my scope and started a scan. Two more spotties, another semiplo...and BOING...Buff-breasted Sandpiper. Where are these birds coming from? Like a dolt I yelled out to them that I had a buffie, which scared the crap out of the bird and I lost it. In my defense, hand signals wouldn't have worked and I don't have either of their phone numbers. We scanned for a while unsuccessfully and then my friend took off for a walk around the bogs. Meanwhile after another 15 minutes or so of scanning, D... came up with the bird, on the other side of the bog near where we parked. That was great because I was starting to doubt my sighting. Now we only needed to get my friend on it. He was coming up the south side of the bog, close to where the bird was running around in the short grass (the Middle Bog hasn't had time to grown up like the Lower) and D... walked over to him and got him on the bird. It was too far for my camera and too active for me to digiscope. It then took off. Still, we all got it, we all saw it well and over the course of the day I know that 3 more people have seen it in the Lower Bog where it relocated and was refound by a birder who saw my alert. He was in the midst of writing a scientific paper, stopped, and came out for the bird, finding it in the Lower Bog. Alas, the golden-plovers were not refound.
So, while my list is short for the day--34--it is mostly because I spent the majority of it picking through the shorebirds instead of birding the larger, more diverse habitats that I usually do.
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