Six Buff-breasted Sandpipers pause on dry ground at Jerome Park Reservoir

September 2, 2026Southern New England Coastal Plains and Hills

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Six were on the ground along Reservoir Avenue at Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx on August 31, at the end of a stretch that also put , , and at the same reservoir between the 21st and the 31st.¹ 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.^2, 3

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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