Coastal shorebirds include visitors on their way to northern breeding grounds
I’m not sure many people notice birds along the shoreline other than gulls. After all, beaches are for sunbathing and launching oneself into the buoyancy of ocean waves.
Nothing against fun in the sun, but let’s take a moment to watch the birds scurrying along the shore’s muddy tidal flats.
Collectively called shorebirds, many migrate this time of year from winter grounds along Latin American coasts to breed on our shores or to sojourn here before heading to northern breeding grounds as far away as the Arctic tundra.
Shorebirds like cardinal-size dunlins abide through winter on Texas shorelines. Their backs turn from a nonbreeding drab gray in winter to a breeding rusty-red in spring, giving them the erstwhile name of “redbacked sandpiper.”
Dunlins can be distinguished by an off-
kilter black patch on a white belly and a long beak curving slightly downward. They will soon head to breeding grounds in northern Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Wilson’s plovers migrate from winter homes on Mexico’s shoreline to breed on the Texas coast. They resemble killdeers, with a single black breast band and an outsized bulky beak.
The sparrow-size, sand-colored piping plovers, with orange legs and stubby, black-and-orange beaks, are cute but highly endangered.
Disruption of shorelines due to vehicular traffic, foot traffic and rampant housing development have reduced their numbers to about 3,000 pairs. More than half the population depends on Texas shores for winter homes.
Piping plovers migrate to breeding grounds on North Carolina’s Atlantic Coast, Canada’s eastern coast and on inland lakeshores of the Northern Great Plains.
Shorebirds are mostly the color of the beach, which helps to camouflage them from predators but also makes them difficult to identify.
Case histories in shorebird identification problems include twinlike short-billed and long-billed dowitchers. Both have brownish bodies the size of mockingbirds, with varied hues of orange on the belly. Dowitchers have tellingly long beaks that jab up and down like thick sewing machine needles into shallow pools and soft mud to feed on worms and crustaceans.
They migrate to breeding grounds on the subArctic and high Arctic from winter homes along Texas shores down to South American shores.
It’s OK if we can’t tell one dowitcher from another, or pick out a plover from a dunlin. But don’t overlook shorebirds; they need our beaches as much as we do.