Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

Eskimo Curlews, as painted by John James Audubon in the early 1800s. From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: Fifty years ago today, on Sept. 4, 1963, an Eskimo Curlew was shot on the island of Barbados. Many migratory shorebirds were shot every fall on islands in the Lesser Antilles. It was almost a fluke that this small curlew was recognized as something unusual and that the specimen was given, many months later, to an ornithologist from Philadelphia. And in another fluke, as a little kid and beginning birder, I heard about this only two years after the curlew was shot. I had joined the National Audubon Society at the age of nine, since it was the only bird group that I'd heard of, and one of my very first issues of Audubon Magazine carried the sad news about the curlew.  At that point the Eskimo Curlew was already a bird of legend. It had been abundant at one time, migrating north through the Great Plains in spring, nesting in the Canadian Arctic, migrating out over the Atl...

From Greenwich, Connecticut, Kenn writes:   It has been a long day and our eyes are barely open, but we wanted to at least mention a couple of highlights from today. After last night's presentation to the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, we couldn't bear to leave the Ocean State without at least trying for the Wood Sandpiper that had been present at Marsh Meadows Preserve near Jamestown, RI, for the last several days.  This Old World shorebird has been found only a handful of times ever in the Lower 48 States.  So we set the alarm for 6 and drove down to meet our friend Drew Wheelan at Jamestown.  Drew and Kimberly and I spent quite a while slogging around in the marsh on the west side of the road, in areas where the sandpiper had been seen on other days, and finally got the word that the bird had just been relocated on the east side of the road.  It took a soggy hike of half a mile to get to the right spot, but once we arrived, we had long, satisying looks...

Summer? Says who? For this White-rumped Sandpiper, this is still the season of spring migration. From the middle of a flooded field in northern Ohio, Kenn writes: After a totally crazy month, the calendar has just clicked over from May -- we call it May-hem around here -- to June. So what season is it now? If you’re a White-rumped Sandpiper, it’s still spring, still the height of northward migration season. Of course, if you’re a White-rumped Sandpiper, you’re probably not reading this blog. If you’re a sandpiper, you’re too busy to read things like this. Especially if you’re a White-rumped. More than three dozen different species of sandpipers are found regularly in North America; all of them are at least somewhat migratory. None of them migrates north later in spring, on average, than the White-rump. This bird has a lot of distance to cover. Its wintering sites are all in southern South America, including some as far south as the tip of the continent -- or even farther: this amazin...

From northern Ohio, Kenn writes: Okay, the name of the "Purple" Sandpiper is an exaggeration. The feathers just have a faint purple sheen when they're freshly molted, all right? But these birds are impressive for deeper reasons than just their color. We were reminded of that during our day of birding the Lake Erie shoreline in blizzard conditions on Nov. 18. Kim already told you about our visit to Huron Harbor early in the day (see her post "Extreme Birding"). The highlight of the afternoon came at Headlands Beach State Park, east of Cleveland, where we found two Purple Sandpipers along the breakwater. The Purple Sandpiper is an incredibly tough creature. Its nesting range straddles the Arctic Circle in eastern Canada, mostly in areas that few birders ever visit. It stays in that freezing Arctic climate until very late in the fall. Then it just comes south to the colder regions of the Atlantic Coast, where it spends the winter scrambling around on coastal rocks...