Shorebird guided tour

August 23, 2018
26 species

by Tom Andersen
Communications Director
Summer on Long Island Sound’s coast is a drawn-out carnival of shorebirds. Some, like Piping Plovers and Willets, nest here. Most stop on their way south from their Arctic breeding grounds. They arrive on the wind and depart on the wind, adults and juveniles of more than a dozen species, from early July into September.

It probably doesn’t get enough attention for the spectacular natural phenomenon that it is. I had been asking Frank Mantlik, a member of the regional board at our Coastal Center at Milford Point, to let me tag along some day when he went to look for shorebirds. Yesterday was the day.

Shorebirds at the Coastal Center. Photo by Anthony Donofrio.

All I wanted was a straightforward guided tour of whatever was on the beach. I’d write about it as a change from the regular weekly Bird Finder that focuses on a single species. Frank provided it.

Inland it was muggy. But from the Sound side of the dunes to the tip of the sandbar the wind blew past us from Stratford Point at a pace brisk enough to make it a comfortable morning.

Frank Mantlik, left, and Simon Campo on the sandbar at Milford Point.

The third member of our party was a young man who introduced himself as Simon Campo. He had moved here from the state of Washington just three weeks ago and found Milford Point on eBird. We invited him to join us.

Frank was disappointed that there were no terns. Just a few days ago there had been 500 or so over the Housatonic, and a few rarities had turned up elsewhere in Connecticut – a Sandwich Tern at Sandy Point the other day, for example.

The tide was still rising. The wind drove it higher onto the beach and sandbars. Most birders come here two to three hours on either side of the flood, a slot that concentrates shorebirds close to shore. When the tide drops and the mudflats run out for what seems like a thousand yards, the birds disperse.

On the bar, Frank trained his scope on a flock of Sanderlings, Ruddy Turnstones, and Black-bellied Plovers on the Sound side – maybe 50 in all. We looked at a half-dozen birds on a tiny spit – maybe a foot wide by six feet long – that pointed toward the apron of Spartina grass rimming the lagoon. Sanderling. Semipalmated Sandpiper. And Least Sandpiper, furthest to the right in Frank’s scope: “Least is the only small shorebird with yellowish green legs, that we get.”

On the Sound side, most of the birds were camouflaged in seaweed and tide wrack. We were approaching a narrow part of the bar but wanted to get closer to the tip. Frank said, “Creep up? They’ll probably flush. I don’t like to do that but they’ll move to the tip, where there are more shorebirds.”

We walked slowly, crunching the bleached shells of oysters, quahogs, and whelks. The Least Sandpiper didn’t feel like moving, so Frank focused on it again: “If you look now, you can see the legs a lot better.” Comparing it to the much more abundant Semipalmated Sandpipers, he said, “The bill is a little bit longer, a little bit pointier, and it’s got a bit of a droop to it.” I turned my hat backwards and closed my left eye to look. Even secure on a tripod, the scope vibrated in the wind.

We walked from northeast to southwest on the outer sandbar, due south of the green pin.

A small bird popped out of the Spartina. Simon found it, pointed it out to me, and I pointed it out to Frank. “Saltmarsh Sparrow,” Simon said. “That’s a lifer for me.” Frank took photos: “That’s a young bird – with that streakiness on the breast. I haven’t seen it in this plumage. It could be a Seaside. I’ll show the photos to Chris Elphick.” Elphick, a UConn professor, is the state’s expert on tidal marsh sparrows. (Friday, August 24 update: Chris Elphick emailed this morning to say the bird was a Seaside Sparrow: “Saltmarsh are much more orange.” Photos are below.)

The wind-blown water crashed into whitecaps over the shoals. Frank found two Short-billed Dowitchers resting on the lagoon side in a flock of Black-bellied Plovers: “Short-billed is the default species here.” Long-billed Dowitchers tend to migrate through the central part of the country.

By now it was 10:20. The tide was dropping. Gulls moved from the tip of the point to a slowly-emerging bar about 20 feet away. Frank spotted a bird flying west over the sound, near shore: a very dark, juvenile Peregrine Falcon. That explained the chaos among the shorebirds a few seconds earlier. It whirled, and landed on the sandbar and then flew over the point toward the big marsh. The shorebirds settled again, hundreds of them lined along the lapping water.

We capped our species list at 26. Frank said the shorebird numbers were down – a few weeks ago there were thousands, mostly Semipalmated Sandpipers. I would have loved to have seen that. But I was hardly disappointed. There easily could have been more than a thousand individual birds at Mllford Point on Wednesday.

Sanderling, Black-bellied Plover, Semipalmated Plover, Ruddy Turnstone, American Oystercatcher, Semipalmated Sandpiper, Least Sandpiper, Spotted Sandpiper, Short-billed Dowitcher, Ring-billed Gull, Herring Gull, Laughing Gull, Double-crested Cormorant, Snowy Egret, Great Egret, Yellow-crowned Night Heron, Chimney Swift, Tree Swallow, Gray Catbird, Osprey, Mute Swan, Mallard, Peregrine Falcon, Mourning Dove, Song Sparrow, Seaside Sparrow.