If you 'write' it, will they come? (revised)

First of all, apologies for the way the initial version of this post behaved. I had several people contact me to say that only one of the 15 images would show. I don't know the finer points of how this site works. In more than 460 posts, I have never had this happen before that I am aware of. When I view it on my screen, it seems all is well, but obviously that isn't good enough!

So I will try it again.......



This post will further delay the series on the rare birds of Rondeau. But that is due to the presence of one of those rarities that I featured on one of those posts earlier in the series. Did mentioning it in one of those previous posts have something to do with its current presence? If so, perhaps a few more of those rarities will show up sooner rather than later! Probably not, but one can always hope.

The rare species I am featuring in this post is none other than Purple Sandpiper. It was a couple of days ago, on Sunday, that a report came in from Craig and Katie who had ventured out the South Beach of Rondeau and discovered a Purple Sandpiper feeding along the shore of the south end of the bay/marsh area. Steve and Blake were already in the park and decided to make the trek to look for it. Blake described some of that in his subsequent post, which you can read at this link.

I was not able to get out that day, but yesterday (Monday) looked like a decent day weather wise, and I had the time, so I decided to go. I knew with all of the potential habitat the bird might stick around in the same place or it might not. Such are the risks of birding.

So off I went. I got to the South Beach and the weather confirmed my suspicions: it would be doable, but a challenge. The temperature inland was a balmy 12C or more, but with the quite brisk wind coming off the cold water of the lake at 35-40 km/hr, it was more like 3C. The lake was riled up, so no walking along the firmer sand along the lake side of the beach, just the softer sand a bit inland. There was the usual series of Phragmites stands, shrubby thickets and grape vine tangles to contend with. Fortunately there was wide open space in between these obstacles, and after about three kilometres of these conditions, I arrived at where the bird had been seen on Sunday.

There is a lot of shoreline habitat, but no bird was to be seen. I kept on going towards Erieau hoping the bird was still around, and after awhile, I caught a glimpse of it up ahead. At this point I was probably less than 250 metres from the last wooded part along the South Beach, right across from Erieau and which some folks refer to as Gull Island. It isn't really an island, except for when the lake's wave action breaches and carves out a channel between the lake and the bay.

I got a little closer, and knowing the temperament of the species, I decided to squat down and wait. It started coming my way, probing and feeding on the washed-up vegetation on the more sheltered bay side of the South Beach.

Although it always looked alert, in coming towards me it didn't seem to be the least bit concerned by my presence at all. At one point it came so close, probably no more that about 2 metres of me, that I couldn't get the entire bird in my camera's field of view so I had to reduce the focal length of the zoom lens!

The bird was more than cooperative. It was active all the time, so some of the photos were not as in focus as I would have liked. But of the more than 125 photos I took over the ~35 minutes I spent with this bird, some were definitely keepers. Here are a few:

It was regularly tugging away at a bit of vegetation or something. This next photo shows a stem of some sort, with a couple of small snail shells clinging to it, which was no doubt the reason the bird grabbed on to it.

A question that most of us had was: where did this bird come from? Did it just arrive on spring migration, or was the winter we had, or rather did not have, mild enough and with enough shoreline habitat available to cause it to linger rather than fly off to the southern east coast? I had been out to about this point covering my territory for the Christmas Bird Count last mid-December, and although the habitat was good then, there was no sign of this bird. But there had been an abundance of shoreline and similar habitat around the bay, and most of it was inaccessible, so shorebirds of various species could have been present and just not seen. A Purple Sandpiper had been seen elsewhere around the bay in very early December, so perhaps it just moved out of sight for the next few months. As mentioned in a previous post this past CBC was the first time in about two decades when we did not get any shorebirds at all.

After a delightful time with this relatively rare shorebird, I headed back. That is the western edge of the Rondeau forest way off in the background, about 3 kilometres away.