Good Day of Slow Birding

I was down at St. Marks NWR on Monday. It was a good day of slow birding. This Spring has not produced an amazing array of migrant birds, most have just flown over without stopping. However, searching for Spring migrant species that you haven’t seen since Fall migration can be like being a kid on an Easter Egg hunt; you search and then you find a colorful addition to your basket. It’s not necessarily the total number that you find. In some ways, it’s the search that matters.

As I entered the refuge, heading down to the Tower Pond Trail, which is generally the best spot for Spring migrants, I had stopped to quickly check East River Pool and Stony Bayou I. The American Flamingo was back on East River Pool and Stony Bayou was covered with shorebirds. I did a quick scan and saw a mix of Semipalmated Plovers, Least Sandpipers, Dunlin and Short-billed Dowitchers with a few Willets and Greater Yellowlegs mixed in.

A line of frontal storms had swept Eastward across the Gulf overnight. It had moved through too early to have any effect on trans-Gulf migrants from the Yucatan, but I hoped that maybe it would put down Eastern Gulf migrants. I found Blackpoll, Palm and Prairie Warblers and an American Redstart.  These are expected species that have wintered in the Caribbean islands, the Florida peninsula or Eastern South America and would be coming up along or across the Eastern Gulf.

On my way out of the refuge, I stopped to take a closer look at the shorebirds on Stony Bayou. There were a few Semipalmated and Pectoral Sandpipers, migrants up from South America. I saw a Wilson’s Plover, one of the handful of shorebirds that breeds at St. Marks. Then, I started noticing larger birds that hadn’t been there in the morning, feeding among the Least Sandpipers. They were tipped over with their tails pointed up as they fed. You could see that their long wings extended past their tails. There were easily over a dozen of them.

They were White-rumped Sandpipers, the largest flock that I have seen at the refuge. They are extreme migrants that may log 23,000 miles in a year as they move from their breeding grounds in the High Arctic (the Northern edge of the continent and the shore of all those arctic island that nobody knows the names of) and their wintering grounds that range from Southern Brazil to Tierra del Fuego at the Southern end of South America.

White-rumps are elliptical migrants. In the Fall most of them head East to the Canadian Maritime provinces and then fly South across the Atlantic for almost two days until they reach South America. They are high and fast flyers and may be going 50 miles per hour at almost two miles high. 

In Spring they move North and mass along the coast of Argentina. Their Spring migration is an epic journey that they accomplish in three or four jumps that may each take two days of flying and cover 2,500 miles. They travel up through the central Gulf and pass to our West. We always get a few birds borne on eastward winds, usually single individuals that will stay for a few days to feed and bulk up before making a final jump that may take them all the way to their Arctic breeding grounds.

My guess is that the Eastward moving front hit a flight of White-rumped Sandpipers in mid-Gulf and pushed them to us. They likely came in during the mid-morning after I had passed by Stony Bayou. This has happened before and will again. Weather has a big effect on the mix and number of migrants that are seen at the refuge.

You can approach birding at many levels. It is enough just to marvel at the beauty of a Redstart or listen to the many variations of a White-eyed Vireo’s song. Beyond this, there are stories to puzzle out as you watch birds pass through St. Marks.