tom baxter
Well-known member
From Island Beach State Park in New Jersey USA.
I saw 3 different individual shorebirds that left me puzzled today. All 3 appeared to be of the same species. They behaved in a way that I have never before seen a shorebird. They were SWIMMING in the ocean in the surf. The winds were coming from the east and were sustained at 25-30 mph today and the surf was very rough. These birds would purposefully land in the water and would swim and seemed to be quite comfortable doing so. When the waves tumbled towards them and forced them up, they would pick up on the wing and glide over the face of the waves as they tumbled over, never ascending more than a few feet above the surface of the water, and then plop right back down into the water to swim.
Would sanderling ever be capable of performing this behavior? One of these 3 birds flew from a landward origin and into the water, passing pretty close in front of me, but I did not get a good look at it. Out in the water where I observed them for a duration, all I could make out was that they had dark backs with thin white lines in their wing patterns like a dunlin/sanderling and they were white underneath, and they definitely had some darker color around their neck.
With east winds could these birds have been phalarope sp.?
I would be very interested to hear whether people can attribute this behavior to sanderlings or not, this behavior has never before been documented by myself.
I saw 3 different individual shorebirds that left me puzzled today. All 3 appeared to be of the same species. They behaved in a way that I have never before seen a shorebird. They were SWIMMING in the ocean in the surf. The winds were coming from the east and were sustained at 25-30 mph today and the surf was very rough. These birds would purposefully land in the water and would swim and seemed to be quite comfortable doing so. When the waves tumbled towards them and forced them up, they would pick up on the wing and glide over the face of the waves as they tumbled over, never ascending more than a few feet above the surface of the water, and then plop right back down into the water to swim.
Would sanderling ever be capable of performing this behavior? One of these 3 birds flew from a landward origin and into the water, passing pretty close in front of me, but I did not get a good look at it. Out in the water where I observed them for a duration, all I could make out was that they had dark backs with thin white lines in their wing patterns like a dunlin/sanderling and they were white underneath, and they definitely had some darker color around their neck.
With east winds could these birds have been phalarope sp.?
I would be very interested to hear whether people can attribute this behavior to sanderlings or not, this behavior has never before been documented by myself.
