And a few stray reports

On a recent Thursday afternoon (September 23rd) we hightailed it over to Rocky Hill after work, to pick up a few more birds from the Connecticut River Meadows. A flock of American Golden Plover, Pluvialis dominica, had been reported on Connecticut Birds the day before, along with their precise location, and it didn't take us long to find them.

Sorting through the crowd of Killdeer, Charadrius vociferus, we eventually counted seven goldens - elegant large plovers, feeding in the freshly turned soil. In amongst the flock was another other pretty special little shorebird - two Buff-breasted Sandpipers, Tryngites subruficollis. And given how hard we were studying the flock, it was no surprise that we turned up another species - one Pectoral Sandpiper, Calidris melanotos.

A very exciting outing, because the Buff-breasted is a new bird for me, and tho' it sounds mushy, but I was left breathless by the wildness and elegance of the Golden Plovers. Checking my life list back at home, I discovered that I had already recorded this species as "NH - 1970's". Probably something spied on a coastal birding trip with my father and Arthur Borror -- "see that one, second from the right, at the edge of the flock of Black-bellied's? -- that's the Golden" -- so my twelve-year-old's tick mark on the list wasn't even a memory, just a tick mark. I'm so glad we made the hasty trip down to the meadows!

Seeing those two species for Jorge was bittersweet - they're on their way south - all the way to Argentina and Uruguay. A large percentage of the world population of Tryngites subruficollis winters in Uruguay. [if you follow this link to Bird Life International, look for the Important Bird Areas heading, and click the link to the map - I couldn't make a proper direct link to the map].

The American Golden-Plover, Pluvialis dominica, has one of the longest recorded migratory routes of any bird. Nesting in the Canadian Arctic, when they head south, they make coastal landfalls along the eastern US to feed, before the long flight to northern South America. Here they pause to fatten up again, before heading over the Amazon forests en route to sites in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

After all of that migratory shorebird drama, one final not-to-forget bird is a solitary little Savannah Sparrow, Passerculus sandwichensis, seen in the yard at home on Wednesday afternoon last week, September 29th.