Baird's sandpiper logs a lot of miles

A big stretch from a small Baird's sandpiper

Baird's sandpiper logs a lot of miles

Columbus Dispatch
NATURE

Jim McCormac
September 6, 2015

One of the most brutish flights an Ohioan can make is to Sydney, Australia. From Port Columbus, it’s well over 9,000 miles. Round trip: 18,000-plus miles and 46 hours flight time.

I have done it and wouldn’t want to make a habit of such a journey.

At least we have in-flight movies, snacks and comfortable seats.

Not so the Baird’s sandpiper, which flies just as far. I recently visited a wetland near Wooster and saw several of these feathered globe-trotters. The sleek little shorebirds scurried about the mud flats, gulping down small invertebrate animal life plucked from the mire.

This wetland serves as a refueling station for the Baird’s sandpiper and many other shorebirds. The other sandpipers and plovers include killdeer, semipalmated plover, greater and lesser yellowlegs, least sandpiper and Wilson’s snipe.

Few of the Baird’s sandpipers’ companions will match their journey, though.

The Baird’s sandpiper breeds in the highest reaches of the Arctic, where polar bears roam. The birds I observed were spawned about 2,500 miles to the north, and they have a long aerial trek ahead of them.

Some Baird’s sandpipers spend winter in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. Their yearly journey between summer and winter haunts is about the same distance as the Columbus-to-Sydney flight.

Only a small group of the 36 species of shorebirds that visit Ohio annually make such lengthy journeys. Evolution has endowed these long-haul fliers with traits that allow them to cover serious distances. Extra-long wings produce efficient, sustained flight. Powerful pectoral muscles provide plenty of punch to flap those wings. And a built-in GPS system allows unerring navigation over great distances.

The Baird’s sandpiper in the accompanying photo is a juvenile, as were the others I saw. The adults precede the juveniles by a few weeks on the southbound migration.

Almost all Baird’s sandpipers in Ohio are seen in late summer and fall. Their northward migration takes them well to the west, through the Great Plains states. The fall routes occur over a much broader front and well to the east of the narrow spring corridor. An elliptical pattern such as this probably evolved to take advantage of the best stopover habitats during each season.

Little data exists regarding the longevity of a Baird’s sandpiper, but it’s not unreasonable to speculate that some live for at least a decade. By the time such an elder would make its final flight to the great mud flat in the sky, it would have flown at least 180,000 miles. All this from a 38-gram dynamo with a wingspan of less than a foot and a half.

The sandpiper was named in honor of Spencer Fullerton Baird, an accomplished naturalist who served as the first curator of the Smithsonian Institution.

Baird was an inveterate field man and quite the traveler. During the calendar year of 1842, he hiked more than 2,100 miles in the course of his explorations.

Even that pales in comparison with the wanderings of his namesake sandpiper.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at www.jimmccormac

Some shorebirds, at Funk

Mudflats and shallow pools blanket the landscape just south of Funk Bottoms Wildlife Area in Wayne County, along the north side of Wilderness Road. An active peat mining operation has temporarily created good shorebird habitat, and reports of shorebirds have been coming in from this area for a few weeks. Last Sunday, I was finally able to get to this spot and observe some waders, and make a few images.

Great views of the birds can be had from the dike running along the east side of the wetlands, but a spotting scope is highly useful. The photography conditions are OK, but not great. For the most part, unless you are armed with Canon's 800mm lens, most birds are a bit distant for really excellent images. That, compounded by a less than desirable angle of view stemming from standing atop the dike, means that only the closest birds can really be nailed well. I was shooting with my 500mm with the 1.4 teleconverter on a Canon 7D Mark II 1.6 crop sensor camera, and still didn't like most of my results of the often too distant birds. Another issue with shooting distant shorebirds on broiling mudflats on baking mid-summer days is the heat waves between you and your subjects. The closer one can be, and the less cropping that needs to be done to the photos, the better.

But shoot the birds on their terms, and that means not impinging too closely and causing them to flush. Most of these animals have come a LONG way, and don't need the unnecessary hassle of some photographer spooking them. Many shorebirds can be quite tame and confiding, and with a bit of patience one can let them approach on their own terms. That's how I got these shots - by waiting quietly in good locations, and letting birds eventually settle into my side of the wetland.

A Lesser Yellowlegs, Tringa flavipes, appears to engage in interpretive dance in the backdrop. The pair of Wilson's Snipe, Gallinago delicata, seem unimpressed. By mid-August, southbound shorebird migration is picking up steam. Many of the sandpipers and plovers that we see this time of year nested FAR to our north, even in the high reaches of the Arctic. They get but one crack at pulling off a nest. If something causes their nesting attempt to fail, the adults often just head back south. Some southbound adult shorebirds can appear here by early to mid July.

Mid to late August migration sees the overlap of adult and juvenile birds, too, which makes for great study. The snipe on the left is a brightly colored juvenile resplendent in a fresh coat of feathers. The other snipe is an adult. Its feathers are duller and more worn. In general, especially as concerns the shorebirds that breed in the far north, the adults return in advance of the juveniles.

A Least Sandpiper, Calidris minutilla, flutters to balance in deep muck. These tiny sandpipers are one of the so-called "peeps", which can be frustrating to identify as the various species look similar. The Least Sandpiper is one of our most common peeps, along with the Semipalmated Sandpiper. Don't let their diminutive appearance fool you. These are tough birds, breeding where the Polar Bears roam. Ohio is but a temporary way station on their very long migrations.

While I was standing in an especially nice spot, this graceful Lesser Yellowlegs was kind enough to fly in to the closest shore and set about preening itself. That behavior allowed me to capture some interesting poses.

A highlight was several Baird's Sandpipers, Calidris bairdii. This is another of the aforementioned "peeps". Baird's Sandpipers are never particularly common in Ohio, and the chance to study one at close range is always gratifying. This individual is a juvenile, as evidenced by its prominently fringed feathers and neat adobe earth coloration. At least two others were present during my visit.

This animal weighs little more than an ounce, but it is one of the world's champion migrants. Baird's Sandpiper nests in the highest reaches of the Arctic, and winter in southern South America. Some of them travel over 9,000 miles between summer and winter habitats. Conservation and appropriate management of wetland stopover sites is of vital importance to successfully protecting populations of birds such as this species. CLICK HERE for a brief essay that I wrote about the value of mud, and the possible roles that long-haul migrant shorebirds such as Baird's Sandpiper may play in the distribution of certain plant species.

Those wings are made for flying! Of the five regularly occurring "peep" sandpipers in Ohio (Baird's, Least, Semipalmated, Western, White-rumped), two have exceptionally long primary flight feathers. This juvenile Baird's Sandpiper was good enough to stretch for my lens, revealing its super long wings that extend well beyond the tail. It and the White-rumped Sandpiper literally travel from one end of the earth to the other each year, and both species have evolved the long wings with greater surface area to help them achieve these incredible journeys.

In a few short weeks, this sandpiper is likely to be foraging in a wetland near Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The annual movements of shorebirds around the globe is truly one of the marvels of avian migration.

Baird's Sandpiper

The fabled Conneaut Harbor, Ashtabula County, Ohio. John Pogacnik and I led a field trip here about a week ago, and this is part of our group, scanning for birds. This harbor was created by walling off part of Lake Erie, and over time a massive sand spit formed. Conneaut can be a gold mine for birds, and scores of rarities have turned up here over the years. It seems that just about anything with wings drops in, if only for a few minutes.

Conneaut Harbor, especially on a nice day, can be a bit of a madhouse, as people also flock to the sands. Those large airborne things in the backdrop are the kites of windsurfers. Other people are walking about, and dogs are usually roaring around, sometimes chasing birds. The worst are the hicks in ATV's and 4 x 4's tearing up the area and spooking everything in the harbor. Fortunately none of the latter crowd were in evidence on this trip.

We hadn't been out of the van for a minute and someone pointed to a small shorebird working the waterline. Baird's Sandpiper! An auspicious start to the trip, indeed. Not many Baird's pass through Ohio in their long transit between breeding and wintering grounds. Most birds move to the west of here, and although this beautiful sandpiper is not a rarity, it is greatly outnumbered by many of our other migrant shorebirds.

This Baird's Sandpiper, like nearly every one of them that steps on Ohio mud, is a juvenile. The youngsters can be distinguished by their fresh, bright plumage and pale feather edgings which create a distinctly scaled appearance. Our bird was born only a few months before we saw him, spawned from a nest on the tundra in the highest reaches of the Arctic.

Unfortunately, this animal has an issue with its wing. As can be seen in the photo, its right wing is dragging and obviously injured, and this may not bode well for its survival. Yet we saw it leap airborne and make short flights with no seeming difficulties, so we can hope for the best. Its trailing wing does allow us to see a distinctive feature of Baird's Sandpiper: very long wings that project beyond the tail, and give the bird a slender attenuated look. These are the wings of a champion long-haul migrant.

Map courtesy of NatureServe.

This map lays out the stupefying, nearly unbelievable annual peregrinations of the Baird's Sandpiper. These animals breed as far north as one can go, and then travel to the other end of the globe - from one end of the world to the other. The adult birds, which leave the breeding grounds a few weeks prior to the juveniles, make the transit with great rapidity; in as few as five weeks. The young birds make the same amazing journey, and do it without a guide - they rely solely on their built-in navigations units. And to think, some of us can get lost in the grocery store!

Places such as Conneaut Harbor, although certainly not pristine, serve as vital way stations for shorebirds engaging in their fantastic journeys. Mudflats are fuel stops; places where sandpipers and plovers can gorge on tiny mud-dwelling animal life and build the fat deposits that will sustain them on long flights. A Baird's Sandpiper weighs only 35 or 40 grams. That's less than a third of what your new iPhone 5 weighs. Little birds that fly long distances need a lot of food, and plenty of stopover places to find it.

Here's hoping the bird featured here successfully makes its way to Argentina to join the rest of its tribe.