Just down the road from the dump is a large area with many salt production ponds/ impoundments. There just happens to be a giant abandoned building there... oh ya, my headache is getting worse and my legs are cramping. One of our first birds before the main impoundment area was a leucistic Wood Sandpiper: |
| Leucistic Wood Sandpiper |
For my friends in Massachusetts, picture Forward Pool at PRNWR, then, with out a blink of an eye, multiply that by over 100 and fill each one of them with birds. This place was staggering with the volume of shorebirds. Here is a wall of shorebirds with many Great Knot: |
| A mass of shorebirds with many Great Knot |
From there, it was what ever you wanted. We tallied 31 (!) species of shorebirds in this complex. I really started feeling crummy so Na and I did some car birding before hooking back up with Rick and Bob. It was a bird photographer's dream come true. Right out the window were Black-winged Stilt, Black-tailed Godwit, Broad-billed Sandpiper, Curlew Sandpiper, etc.. This blogger sucks for putting in pictures so I will only put in a few. |
| Black-tailed Godwit |
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| Broad-billed Sandpiper |
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| Black-winged Stilt |
We came across a large group of shore birds and in them were Asian Dowitcher. Rick's mad digiscoping skills started to show themselves even more:
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| Asian Dowitcher courtesy of Rick Heil |
And in another large pool were hundreds upon hundreds of Black-winged Stilts including this leucistic bird:
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| Leucistic Black-winged Stilt |
We all hooked back up and continued to the far end (northeast) portion of the area. Here we came across a lake with ducks and grebes - 5 Eurasian Wigeon were a bonus.
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| Eurasian Wigeon |
On the other side of the lake was this one impoundment that was packed with shorebirds - and more were flying in. The birds would cross the lake, fly over the road, and go into the impoundments. The light was not that great (sun a little too high) but I still wanted to get flight shots of all these exotic shore birds. So while Rick and Bob worked the mob of birds, I kept half an eye out for incoming birds.
Sometimes it pays to be lucky. I had just photographed a group of Black-tailed Godwit and Pacific Golden-Plover when a group of greenshank came screaming over us. I was able to get off about 8 shots with only a few coming out. I kept going with my flight shots when Rick says Nordmann's just landed in the pool! We all scoped the birds out and in fact there were 15. I mentioned to Rick I photographed them flying in and we looked at the camera back and sure enough, I got lucky. Here are a few pics of these uncommon tringa:
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| Nordmann's Greenshank |
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| Nordmann's Greenshank |
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| Nordmann's Greenshank |
As we looked at these photos, Rick mentioned that they almost have a feel for a large Terek Sandpiper - they sure did!
On the way out to get lunch, there was this very obliging Whiskered Tern gobbling down something that appeared to be a prawn: |
| Whiskered Tern |
Next stop is lunch, not unlike the Whiskered Tern...
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