Two Hudsonian Godwits refuel on the East Pond's exposed mud

Two Hudsonian Godwits (Limosa haemastica) have been working the mud at the north end of the East Pond at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, reported there repeatedly through September 7.¹ They are plain gray-brown birds at this season, nothing like the chestnut of the field-guide breeding shots, and from the shoreline they read as a tall, long-necked shorebird with a very long, slightly upturned bill that is pink at the base. Size is the quickest handle: bigger than the Willets around them, smaller and grayer than a Marbled Godwit. If one flushes, the identification settles itself. A Hudsonian flashes black underwings, a black tail and a white rump; a Marbled Godwit flashes solid cinnamon, and a Willet shows a bold black-and-white stripe across the whole wing.

The reason this pair is interesting has to do with where the rest of the species is right now. Hudsonian Godwits breed on the edge of the boreal zone, with a large population centered on the southern shore of Hudson Bay.² In late summer they gather on James Bay to fatten, then most of them leave on a nonstop flight over the Atlantic toward South America, wintering on tidal mudflats in Argentina and Chile.³ The migration runs as an ellipse: north through the middle of the continent in spring, south over open ocean in fall.³ The Atlantic Coast sits off to the side of that southbound line, and the species turns up here mainly when northeasterly winds push birds inshore.³ Whatever brought these two down, a stop at Jamaica Bay is a chance to refuel before a flight that, for most of their kind, is measured in thousands of miles without landing.

What they are doing on the mud is feeding by touch. The bill looks stiff, but the tip flexes, and the bird drives it into soft sediment, feels for something moving, clamps down, then steps forward and probes again, dowitcher-fashion, sometimes with the head under water. The catch is worms, amphipods, small crabs, snails and insect larvae living in the top few inches of mud.

The East Pond is not tidal flat. It is an impoundment, and the National Park Service drains it into the bay each year from July into September specifically to expose mud for southbound shorebirds and to give them somewhere to feed and rest while the tide covers the flats out in the bay.⁴ September is the tail end of that drawdown window, which is why the north end of the pond is one of the most watched pieces of mud in New York City right now. Anyone who gets there in the next week or two has a fair chance of picking out the two gray godwits among the yellowlegs and dowitchers, and of seeing a bird that is normally far offshore at this time of year, standing in Queens.