(Pluvialis dominica) spotted this week signals something easy to overlook in midsummer: southbound migration has already begun. This Arctic-nesting shorebird completes its breeding early or fails and heads south in July, making golden-plovers among the season's first heralds of the turn toward fall.
This coastline once anchored some of the most critical staging grounds for the species in the hemisphere. Nineteenth-century market hunters slaughtered them by the thousands along the outer Cape, a pressure the population endured until federal protection arrived in the early 1900s. Today, the margin between a good refueling stop and an exhausting one can turn on a few centimeters of tide. Tides are running slightly above predicted this week, which compresses the intertidal habitat these long-distance travelers depend on to fuel their southbound journey.
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at the same reservoir between the 21st and the 31st. All of them breed in the Arctic and all of them are headed south.
The Buff-breasted Sandpiper (
Calidris subruficollis
) is the odd one in that company, because it is a shorebird that does not want the shore. It avoids wet ground. Instead of probing soft mud the way
work a lake edge, it hunts by eye on bare, dry, short ground: stand still, watch, then a quick run forward to snatch an insect off the surface. A mown, open reservoir perimeter is exactly the kind of surface that suits it.
That preference holds at both ends of its year. It nests on high Arctic tundra and winters on the grasslands of the Argentine pampas, and it is a lek breeder, though a loose and flexible one by the standards of birds that lek, with males gathering to display rather than pairing off on defended territories.
If one is on the ground in front of you, it reads warm and evenly buff all over, plainer and softer than the crisply patterned juvenile Baird's Sandpiper that may be standing a few feet away. It is a bird built for dry grass, passing through a city on its way from one end of the hemisphere to the other.
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