Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gambell: The Auklet Extravaganza and Rare Migrants

  Gambell lies at the western tip of Saint Lawrence Island and is only 40 miles from the coast of Russa. We were fortunate to have a couple of days where the weather was nice enough for the snow-covered mountains along the Russian coast to be visible from the island. As much as I was looking forward to a return visit to the Arctic at Barrow (now Utqiagvik), Gambell was the most anticipated segment of our Alaska trip for me as I had never previously visited this fabled location. Gambell is well known as an excellent location for vagrants and for spectacular seawatches, involving tens of thousands of alcids streaming by. Since we had all birded extensively in the Old World, the vagrants took a back seat to the breeding seabirds from our perspective. In addition, after our failure in Nome, Rock Sandpiper was now a major priority. After arriving at midday and settling into our rooms, we decided to head out to the south end of Troutman Lake, where a couple of displaying Rock Sandpip...
Post a Comment
Read more

End of a Nemesis

  Every birder has a few nemesis species that they keep on failing to see. From a Santa Barbara County perspective, I have a few. Of these, Crested Caracara has been the most vexing. About 10 months after moving to the county, one showed up on Vandenberg Airforce (now Space) Base in July 2001. At the time, my understanding was that there was no access to the base for the generic public. However, after learning several birders had gone into to see the bird, I found out that you could get a day permit to access the area it was in. I got a permit but the bird was no longer around when I looked. Since then, there have been a couple of periods where individual caracaras have visited the county several times over a period of multiple years. They have been extremely mobile and I have always been too late to catch up with one. In the last three years, there has been a caracara moving up and down the coast between Santa Barbara and San Diego. Several local birders have seen fly-by views o...
Post a Comment
Read more

There’s No Place Like Nome

 The afternoon of June 1 we flew to Nome for 6 days of birding prior to heading out to Gambell. After picking up our vehicle and settling into our accommodation, we had a couple of hours of daylight to head out to the nearby Nome River Mouth, where a Red-necked Stint had been reported the previous day. As we were driving along the coast road, Andy noticed a flock of geese heading west over the ocean. These were mostly Brant but contained seven Emperor Geese, one of our key targets for the Nome Area. On arrival at the river mouth, we saw another goose flock coming into land there, which included two Emperor Geese. These gave excellent views and ended any concerns about not getting good enough looks. Emperor Goose There was a small mudflat exposed in the river mouth with a good selection of shorebirds. A couple of Bar-tailed Godwits were immediately obvious and scanning through a flock of about 80 peeps quickly revealed the Red-necked Stint – a very bright alternate-plumaged bird – a...
Post a Comment
Read more