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Little greater yellowlegs persevering in the midst of wildfire season. #shorb

King of the mountain. #shorb

The strange ballerina that is the black-necked stilt steps out onto the stage. #shorb

By the way, I did not get any shots, but I saw a crow (might have been the same one each time) chasing killdeer twice and a sandpiper once. No chance of catching them on the wing: it seemed to me the crow was just up to mischief! 😈 #shorb #BirdPhotography #wetlands #Oregon #TualatinValley

Here are some shots of the least sandpipers from yesterday. I couldn't believe how close the few of them on my side of the lake came to me! So tiny, so brave. 😃

#shorb #BirdPhotography #wetlands #Oregon #TualatinValley
https://pie.gd/@faerye/114401115429497412

A Least Sandpiper striding through mud and shallows at the edge of a lightly riffled lake. One of its long legs is lifted and its long spindly toes splayed for its next step. It has a strikingly white, soft-looking belly, and rather beautiful brown and ruddy plumage, all stripes and scales, up top.

A sandpiper seen even closer. Its long thin beak with big nostril way up near the face is slightly open and still glistening with water from foraging. Around its big dark eye, there’s a thin white ring that looks like a string of tiny beads. The brown stripes fro its head trail down onto its white breast feathers. It is walking busily through the muck and occasional grass seedlings.

Two least sandpipers foraging in the shallows. The closer bird is craning its neck slightly, looking into the water. The feathers on their backs and folded wings look like scales, each one softly rounded with a dark brown center and white or orange edges.

Lil’ peeps are so brave today I must call them the Most Sandpipers!

#birding #shorb

@BeazLouise @DrFerrous love a good #Shorb <3

For bird people, suggestions of hashtags to follow: #Shorb #Quorb

Check out these #shorb bookends I found at the outdoor marshket.

Photo of a pair of sandy brown shorebirds with white breasts and bellies, black collars and bands around their throats, slightly snerty, thin bills, and wide, red eyes, standing with their stiff tails almost touching as they face away from each other, long, strawlike legs reaching down into their reflections in the surrounding grey water of a wetland reservoir. In the foreground is a raft of mud and pale, bent rushes; in the background is their long-standing animosity and a frisson of chemistry. The novels we could line up between them would span worlds and emotions.

In addition to this handsome stilt and about 100 cattle egrets, this farm pond also had a great abundance of 'no trespassing' signs and angry barking dogs. So... the photo process was a bit rushed.

#blackneckedstilt #shorb in a small town outside of Arecibo.

A white shorebird with dramatic black markings and long, pale red legs. It has a long, black bill that it is poking into the surface of the water. The photo is a bit blurry and taken from a long way off.

When I photographed a handful of long-billed dowitchers last week, I was struck by how prettily they arrange themselves into aesthetic overlapping attitudes when wading -- I was thinking the collective should be a 'frieze' of dowitchers.

This week there were even more of these dowitchers, so I collected some more interesting sculptural motifs!

#birdPhotography #wetlands #birding #shorb #Oregon #TualatinValley

A flight of fifteen dowitchers wheeling for a landing, in a loose straggling double line so they almost look like a time-lapse of a pair of birds getting closer to the still lake-water. Their grey wings are white at the trailing edge, and their bellies and softly fanned tailfeathers are also white, so their wings, up and down in various graceful stages of flap, are high contrast and striking.

Fifteen long-billed dowitchers taking a steep curve in flight, almost in unison, showing us their backs. Beyond them dead trees and a mess of fallen boughs stand behind a great blue heron. Looking at their backs, more of the patterns in their plumage become clear: long dark tips to their knife-sharp wings, but most especially a bright white oval on the lower back of each, as if someone dipped a finger in paint and marked each one above the tail.

Joining in on a little Saturday morning stretching with this wonderfully cartoony #shorb (a black-necked stilt).

Tiny loaf of commedia dell'arte on the wetland trail today. #shorb

No Tern is an island

Forster's Tern

#birds #birding #shorb #BirdPhotography #nature

Avocets are the high-steppin' fillies of the #shorb world. I don't usually get to see them at my usual local haunts, and I felt particularly lucky to notice this pair on the reservoir trail today just far away enough for me to catch myself and (mostly) silence my footfalls and not spook them when I spotted them.

Photo of an earthy and blue, muddy shallow in a wetland reservoir across which steps the elegant figure of a slender shorebird with a boldly patterned black and white body, a gorgeous blush of an ess-shaped rose head and throat, and a very long, thin, decurved embroidery needle of a bill, perfect for picking up dropped stitches in your knitting or insects in your local reservoir marsh. The bird, an American avocet, has one powder blue leg standing up to the joint in the buggy blue water and the other raised like a flamingo's, ready to step forward, the long toes pointing down like a dancer's. The sun is bright and eir dark eye seems strangely unfocused, perhaps distracted from the hunt by trying to listen for the killdeer, who are going a little nuts overhead an out of frame.

I spotted this sandpiper (no pun intended) storming around on the logs at the edge of the lake reservoir last weekend. They are such a Gary Larson/Far Side kind of #shorb (just look at all that grumpy intentionality).