Lanny McDowell

I am hoping that the quizzical look on this bird’s face will be reflected in yours.  No, not my face;  the face of the bird in the first photo.  It was looking, it turns out, at a swarm of DC cormorants, about twenty strong, gliding around on set wings, pretty much in unison, at considerable altitude.  The wings were outstretched straight enough to bring anhingas to mind.  Anyway, I had the luxury of seeing the pictured bird fly before I got the binocs on it, so I already had an ID before I looked more closely.  It would have been harder if I had only seen it on the ground or, especially, out of habitat context.  The bird and I and Stella were enjoying the post nor’easter brilliance of Eel Pond in Edgartown yesterday.

This is not a bird I have seen on the Vineyard.  Maybe others are more familiar with it.  The species, yes, but the plumage, no.  I do know it’s kind of tacky to not include the ident, but this time that’s how it is.  Let’s see what people come up with; and I hope there is some head scratching and page flipping going on. [click to continue...]

The TTOR shorebird techs had been waiting to see what would hatch from under the Black Skimmer pair out at Norton Point at Katama Bay inside the southeast corner of Martha’s Vineyard.  The birds had laid one egg, annexed two Least Tern eggs into their nest and laid a second of their own.  According to observers, one or two of the tern eggs hatched but did not make it for long.  One of the skimmer eggs hatched into a healthy chick, which we saw today.  We were told a second pair had arrived and laid eggs – it turned out to be three of them.  Four of us, including Martin, the Swedish Phd candidate taking a three week intensive on molecular biology over in Woods Hole at the Marine Biology Lab, then discovered a third pair of skimmers in residence.   All very exciting.  The skimmers are incredible on the wing!

The beginning:

Three adults are a little tight, but not so bad:

The casual ease of flight:

Albatross wannabe:

This is for the guys who went out with me today:

Best shot – a trio of grace on the wing:

Birds are cool!  Lanny

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If you want to delve  into the arcane business of confidently recognizing a Long-billed Dowitcher in the midst of short-billeds this time of year, and it’s still early, please go right ahead and let me know when you have a long-billed nailed down.  All the shorebird books take on this subject and, sort of like the fairly recent Gulls book, the more you read, the more confused and uncertain you are likely to become.  Less can be more.  Dump some of the plumage factors and go for structural comparison.  If you are lucky, really lucky, you will have one species beside the other and not a single bird, bill tucked and snoozing.

The reason for bringing this ID quandary (morass) to the fore is that I saw and photographed a dowitcher on July 29th out at the flats inside the opening of Tisbury Great Pond.  Its central tail feathers were rufous toward the tips, where the barring “should” have a white or light buffy color.  Most references do not mention this feature, but Paulson’s Shorebirds of North America does write about the rufous in the tail being an identifier for long-billed.

Well, in this case I do not happen to believe this, because in another shot taken of the same bird, the bill droops a bit in the last third of its length, which feature is mentioned as reliable for picking out a short-billed (versus a straighter bill for long-billed).  Since every set of comparisons for these two species seems to end up in the scrapheap of variability – except for voice, which all the writers embrace as distinctive – the tail feather ground color issue will be at home on the list of “may be a factor, but not reliable taken alone as a single distinguishing mark”.  In my book, anyway.

We all seem to want the elements that will offer us certainty, but like so many other BIG questions, sometimes the more you look, the less you know.  Not really fair, is it?

Check out the tail feather tips and the bill on this West Tisbury dow:

Dows are Cool! Lan