Bird of the Week: Rock Sandpiper
You’ve seen a lot of sparrows, the Little Brown Jobs or LBJs of birding, and they are admittedly hard to identify in the field. Now, let’s spend some time with birds that are even harder: sandpipers, the peeps of the birding world.
Rock Sandpipers winter on the rocky shores and breakwaters of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. But they breed on the Bering Sea Coast, mostly on mudflats and intertidal zones, which kind of makes you scratch your head about the species common name.
Rock Sandpipers, Homer Small Boat Harbor, Alaska
Most sandpipers are cryptic, quite hard to see in their environment. Rock Sandpipers are a champion cryptic species. blending into their rocky and intertidal environments very well.
There’s always an inclination to think all sandpipers looks the same. But leg color, bill color and shape and coloration do differ; after all, the species have to be able to recognize each other. For Rock Sandpipers, the slightly down-curved bicolored bill, gray-yellow legs and generally grey upper body are the keys.
Camera geek stuff: f6.3, 1/800, ISO2500.
For more bird photos, please visit Frozen Feather Images.
dog bless wingnuts. The be tripping all over themselves with explanations of why the slaughter in a Charleston,SC church wasn’t racially motivated.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-charleston-church-killer-20150619-story.html
The perpetrator hates kristians which is why he bypassed many churches and chose a famous church with a Black congregation.They must be true christians,unlike whitey wingnuts. I hate wingnuts. I rilly do.
That is a picture..which makes me..really REALLY..want to have an..indoor water cove..with boulders and the sandpipers. I can hear them now..honest I can. Our river version at edge of the McKenzie River..love to play the..broken wing game with the dogs..oh yes they do. 🙂
Cornfields are where Hollywood types go to hear voices telling them to build a baseball field in their corn. Disclaimer-cornfields in Nebraska harbor little wicked children that kill adults. Stay away from Nebraska at all costs.
Favorite poet Adrian C Louis talks about evil corn. Is your corn …?
Large bins full of corn have been known to trap and kill dumb farmers. So there is that. I got a tiny whitetail fawn bedded down in potato patch. Cute li’l bugger. Big soft eyes. Red coat with white spots stands out among green spud plants. 🙂 🙂
Yikes!! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3123604/The-president-s-pistol-New-book-claims-Ronald-Reagan-carried-handgun-briefcase-times-administration.html
Quite lovely. I think this is my first look at the Rock Sandpiper.
Those are barnacles on the rocks, Mike. It’s an ocean thing.
/WC
Mikey lives in by-Gawd Ioway, where there are no oceans. We should maybe explain to him what oceans are.
My bad,I thought barnacles grew on Bill the Sailor and whales. We don’t have whales in iowa,either.Got lichens,though. No reindeer.
We got Sea Foam, OceanSpray, sea gulls, Sea Breeze Astringent. and cornfields.
What are cornfields?
yeah- what are cornfields? ?
Maybe they’re the places where corn dogs run around and chase frisbees.
🙂
I forgot sea salt.
What kind of rocks are those? They look like huge masses of parakeet seed stuck together.