Spotted Sandpiper

 This parent Spotted Sandpiper didn't want me in the area with a bunch of young chicks running around. That was mostly why I was able to get close. After finding the chicks I let them be, I had already photographed some this year at another location.

I Can't Complain about the Fog

 It allowed me to get this image late one evening as the sun was going down.

Whimbrel - Flight Shots

 Whimbrels are always one of my target species in early Summer.  They are extremely wary and therefore hard to approach without a certain amount of stealth involved. I had a little luck this year but I'm still striving for that close-up portrait. Here are a couple flight shots.

No Shorebirds to Speak of

 As I stated in the last post I went back the following day to, hopefully, get better images of Pectoral Sandpipers. There was still at least one in the area but I didn't succeed in getting close to it. I thought if I waited patiently it might come to me. I didn't see it again. When the other shorebirds jumped from the pond I was at I went looking for another location with birds. I didn't find a better spot and the clouds had moved in but as I'm waking out of the marsh I see something I wasn't expecting.  Maybe I should have expected it since there were lots of tracks on the beach.  But as I'm looking over I see three coyotes looking back at me.

I decided it might be a good time to depart the marsh but it's a good 200 yards to where I left my backpack. I make it back and realize I dropped something on the way out and have to go back to find it. This time I'm taking a stick for protection. 99 percent of the time coyotes will turn and run when they see a human and so as I'm going back in the marsh one coyote does just that. There is only one left at this point but he's still watching me as I walk toward it. Eventually he turns and joins the others and I don't see them again. I've been back a couple times since and although I saw a lot of tracks the first time, the past weekend there were none. I'm thinking they might have had a passing interest in some of the shorebirds I was trying to photograph.

Pectoral Sandpiper - Adult

 I've spent a lot of my time photographing shorebirds in the last month or so.  I generally don't expect to find Pectoral Sandpipers early in the season. This was the third week of July so I guess it's not surprising that this bird was an adult. Maybe the first adult I've photographed. The Juveniles come later which is true for all the shorebirds and for Pectorals they come in greater numbers so are not hard to find.

They say that Pectorals resemble a large Least Sandpiper. Well here is a good comparison in the second photo, the Pectora being the much larger of the two. There were at least two individuals on this day. I did attempt to photograph them on a second day but I encountered something I wasn't expecting. More on that in the next post.

Common Yellowthroat

 I believe this is the same bird in both photos. Both were shot at the same location but days apart. There was another adult male Common Yellowthroat in the same area but he was missing all his tail feathers so not hard to tell one from the other. I have shots of the other one as well but I'll not post them out of respect until he gets a new tail.

Piping Plover on Nest

Piping Plover incubating eggs in early June of 2023. This was at the site near Matthew's Lake. I know that 4 chicks hatched and at least one fledged but that's as much as I know about this location.