A single American Golden-Plover refuels on farm ground west of Fowlerville

A single American Golden-Plover (Pluvialis dominica) has been working the farm ground along West Sherwood Road west of Fowlerville for the past several days, seen again on September 7.¹ It is a long way from any shoreline, and that is the point. This is a shorebird that prefers dirt to water: plowed fields, sod, short pasture, anywhere the vegetation is low enough that a bird can see what is moving on the ground in front of it.

Watch it for a minute and the method is plain. It runs a few steps, stops dead, scans, then darts forward to pick something off the soil, much the way a robin hunts a lawn. It is finding prey by eye, not by probing, which is why it wants bare or close-cropped ground rather than the mudflats other shorebirds crowd onto. In a September field that means beetles, grasshoppers, ants, flies, spiders and earthworms turned up by tillage or exposed on short turf.

By this date the bird has mostly shed its summer look. The black face and belly and the gold-spangled back that give the species its name are gone or going; adults are patchy and buff-gray, and a juvenile wears crisp, evenly scaled plumage with a fine gold speckle across the back. In that drab state the bird to rule out is the Black-bellied Plover, which also stops in fields on migration. The golden-plover is smaller and slimmer, with a noticeably finer bill and a smaller head, and its folded wingtips extend well past the tail. If it lifts, the difference is settled at once: Black-bellied shows a black patch in each wingpit in every plumage, golden-plover's underwing is plain gray, and its rump and tail are dark like its back rather than pale.

This bird is partway through one of the longest journeys any shorebird makes. It nested this summer on Arctic tundra somewhere between Baffin Island and the Bering Sea.² It will winter on the pampas of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil.² The route is a loop rather than an out-and-back: in fall most of the population stages along the Atlantic coast of Canada and New England and then flies nonstop over the western Atlantic to the north coast of South America, a single overwater leg of roughly 2,400 to 3,100 miles with nowhere to land, rest or feed.² In spring they come back up through the middle of the continent, through the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley, feeding in open fields much like this one.² The full circuit runs on the order of 20,000 miles a year.

A field in Livingston County is an inland refueling stop on the southbound leg, after the tundra and before the coast. Adults leave the Arctic first, in July and August, and juveniles follow from late August into October, so the timing here fits either a late adult still heading south overland or a first-year bird on its first passage, fattening on Michigan insects before a flight that will not touch ground again until Venezuela or the Guianas.