End of a 38-year hoodoo ... well sort of

 

If you have read enough of my blog posts, you probably know that shorebirding is my favorite birding activity. This may stem from starting my birding in areas of the UK and Oregon where passerine vagrants were almost non-existent, but rarer shorebirds rather more frequent. Ever since I arrived in Oregon in 1988, I have been out diligently searching for a Red-necked Stint from late June to late July in Oregon, Washington and now California.

As the decades went by, I despaired of ever finding a stint, but in early June 2023, while hoping to find a late spring vagrant White-rumped Sandpiper, I instead found an adult Little Stint – the first for Santa Barbara County. Breaking my stint “duck”, to use a cricket term, renewed my hopes of finding a Red-necked.

Unfortunately, during June 2025, while I was away in Europe, Lynn Scarlett did find the county’s first White-rumped Sandpiper. This bird naturally hung around for three days and everyone got to see it. Everyone that is to say, except for me! Even worse, this was a bird I had been looking for in the county for over 20 years, checking suitable shorebird spots during their main late May to Mid-June vagrancy window.

During my trip to Alaska, I saw multiple Red-necked Stints and White-rumped Sandpipers, and operating on the dubious theory that because I had seen one recently, I would now find a vagrant one back home, I immediately started checking the Santa Ynez River Estuary (SYRE) once I was back from Utah, as well as Devereux Slough, close to my home in Goleta. Both locations attract dozens to low hundreds of Western Sandpipers, the flocks of which might hold a vagrant stint.

The first few attempts proved fruitless, and numbers and diversity of shorebirds were rather low, as it often is this early in the migration. In fact, in all my years of looking for a Red-necked Stint in early fall migration, I have never found any other rare shorebird.

On July 11, there was a noticeable jump in the number of Western Sandpipers in the Devereux area, with about 400 being present and the next day I drove north to the SYRE full of hope there would be a big push of migrant shorebirds. The fact that some monsoonal moisture was causing a little spotty rain increased my hopes further.

Once I arrived at the SYRE, reality set in as I found that there seemed no more shorebirds than on my previous visit. In fact, dowitchers had decreased to just one. I had to remind myself in 14 years and hundreds of visits to this location, the best shorebird I had ever found was a Sharp-tailed Sandpiper, which is not even a CBRC rarity, although a genuine rarity in the southern part of the state, since most records are from northern California.

After checking the upper part of the estuary where most of the shorebirds were, I headed down to the mouth where an area of mudflats on the north side often holds birds. I was pleased to see a flock of perhaps 200 peeps in the distance and slogged through some salicornia saltmarsh to get to a closer viewing point. Of course, by the time I reached this spot, the birds had moved much further away, but given how restless migrant peep flocks are, I hung and waited for them to come to me, which after a while they did.

Once the flock landed close enough, I began to pan through the flock looking for a stint. I came to a bird that was fairly similar to the surrounding Western Sandpipers in plumage, but a bit larger and much longer-winged, giving the bird an elongated appearance – a White-rumped Sandpiper!  Since there was only one previous July record for the state, I was not even considering this species as a possibility.

White-rumped Sandpiper (left) with Western Sandpipers

The flock periodically moved closer and I was able to study the bird and see the various plumages details in which it differed from the Western Sandpipers, as well as reconfirm the structural differences. I managed a few of my usual crappy pictures.

White-rumped Sandpiper

I finally had something to show for almost 40 years of July shorebirding. I had erased the heart-breaking ‘grip’ of the 2025 Devereux White-rumped Sandpiper. At last, I had found a CBRC-rarity shorebird at the SYRE! That was a lot to take in. I also appreciated the irony that I had found my first stint when searching for a White-rumped Sandpiper, but had now found a White-rumped Sandpiper while looking for a stint.