An American Golden-Plover holds the Tulalip Bay tideflats through September

A single American Golden-Plover (*Pluvialis dominica*) has been on the tideflats at Tulalip Bay, on the Tulalip Reservation north of Everett, since September 13.¹ The species passes through Washington in small numbers every fall, mostly along the outer coast at places like Grays Harbor.² Around Puget Sound it turns up a bird or two at a time, and a single one on a bay like this is the usual showing.

It is a slim, mid-sized plover, bigger than a Killdeer and a little smaller and lighter-built than the Black-bellied Plovers that spend the winter on these same flats. The bill is short and fine. Most of the golden-plovers moving through in September are birds hatched this summer, and a juvenile is neatly spangled above, each back feather fresh and edged in gold and buff so the whole upper side looks scaled. A dark cap sits over a broad pale eyebrow. The throat is white, the breast gray-brown and streaked, the belly white.

The Black-bellied Plover is the bird it will most often stand beside here, and the flight view settles it. Black-bellied shows a black patch in the wingpit and a white rump and tail. The golden-plover's underwing is plain gray, and its rump and tail are dark, the same tone as the back. On a standing bird, the golden-plover's wingtips reach well past the tail and the whole bird reads longer and leaner.

The harder separation is from Pacific Golden-Plover, which also reaches this coast in fall. Underwing color is no help; both are gray there. The test is the folded wing. On an American, four or five wingtip feathers show beyond the longest tertials at rest and the wingtips extend half an inch or more past the tail. On a Pacific, only two or three show and the wingtips barely clear the tail. American is also a shade duller on the face and neck, and its call is a plaintive two-note "chew-ee" with the stress on the first syllable.

The way it feeds shows what kind of bird it is. Golden-plovers hunt by eye, not by touch. The bird runs a few steps, stops, scans the mud, and picks. Dunlin and godwits on the same flat work by feel, probing below the surface with their bills. The plover needs open ground where it can see its prey, and on a tideflat that means small crustaceans and mollusks sitting on top of the mud rather than buried in it.

Its presence here in September follows from the shape of its year. American Golden-Plovers nest on low Arctic tundra from Baffin Island west to the Bering Strait.³ The adults leave in early summer, before their young can fly. Most of them cross to the Atlantic seaboard and launch straight out over the ocean toward northern South America, a nonstop flight that tagged birds have covered in a single 3,100-mile push. The juveniles follow weeks later, on their own, with no adult to lead them. They scatter more widely, and some work down the Pacific coast, which is how one ends up on a Snohomish County mudflat in mid-September. From here the destination is the grasslands of Argentina and Uruguay. In spring the whole population comes north by a different road, up through the Great Plains and the Mississippi Valley, and the species is rarely seen on this coast at all.³ Fall is the season to look.