ABirdingNaturalist Post on NatureWriting!

A post from AbirdingNaturalist has been accepted to the website NatureWriting! With the acceptance of my piece titled “A Vomiting Vulture,” I am now a contributor. This is the first time one of my posts has been featured on another website, so I am pretty excited!

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A Morning in a Marsh with a Marsh

A couple of weeks ago, I went out to the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area to see if I could spot the Marsh Sandpiper that had been hanging around for about a week before. Marsh Sandpipers breed in central Asia and migrate south to India and Africa, so finding one in central California is a rarity, indeed.

It was a lovely morning in the marshes of the bypass. I arrived at Parking Lot C around 5:45, well before it got light. I could hear Barn Owls over the open fields and American Bitterns in the tules and cattails. As dawn slowly began to spread her rose-red fingers across the sky, I began to be able to make out shapes in the marshland around me. At first, they were indistinct sandpiper and duck shapes, but as the light grew, they slowly morphed into Greater Yellowlegs and Gadwalls. These were soon joined by American Avocets and Cinnamon Teal, Black-necked Stilts and Mallards, Killdeer and American Coots. These birds were joined by a half dozen Long-billed Dowitchers, a Semipalmated Plover, and a lovely mixed flock of Least Sandpipers and Dunlin, the later sporting their breeding plumage replete with black belly patches. As I stood and watched the shallow water less than 20 feet in front of me fill with birds, I noticed a sandpiper that looked distinctly different from the rest. It was closest in shape and size to the Greater Yellowlegs but it was somewhat smaller, much lighter in color, and had a delicately refined and slender black bill.

It was the Marsh Sandpiper!

A large, white pickup truck pulled into the parking lot. A figure stepped out and as he walked towards me, donning binoculars, the man asked, “Is it here?” There was no need to specify what “it” was. I happily told him yes, and that it was actually right in front of us. He told me that he had just driven all the way from San Bernardino in southern California to see the bird and was then going to be driving back down to be back home that evening!

I stayed for another 20 min or so, watching the Marsh Sandpiper forage and come and go along with the other birds. Having that many species of sandpiper right in front of me would have been a wonderfully special morning even without the Marsh Sandpiper. It is amazing to see biodiversity so obviously demonstrated. That many species coexisting translates into that many niches and that many food supplies, and the ripple effects continue.

On my way driving out of the bypass I passed a stream of vehicles on their way in. Many drivers gave me questioning thumbs up which I enthusiastically returned. Many others were focused on getting to their destination, and the bird they hoped they would find there. Hunkering low over their steering wheels, their eyes fixed on the road, I knew they were in for a treat.

It was fun watching all those birders coming in to see the Marsh, but I knew that I had gotten something special. I had been lucky enough to encounter the bird myself instead of having it handed to me by someone else. I had also been lucky enough to see the bird all alone for a while, not standing amongst a group.

This was one of those birding experiences that stay with me for a long time. I was walking on air all that day, and for several days after. It was one of those experiences in birding that explain why people will drive 400 miles each way to see a bird, and even now, recalling that morning in the marsh with the Marsh makes me smile.

Marsh Sandpiper (Photo by Gary Nunn).

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