My Life’s Birds: #320-322

July 31, 1994 – Stockton Lake, Mo – By the time I’d reached the end of July, 1994, barely over a year after my transition to a listing (read: serious) birder, I considered myself to be pretty “good”. Now whether or not that was actually true or not is another matter. How one ranks one’s own skills, especially when one is a teenager high on his previous experiences and of the somewhat mistaken impression that simply seeing lots of birds makes one a skilled birder, tends to be less than accurate to say the least. Wildly inaccurate might be even better. And there’s scarcely a group of birds that makes one more aware of the gap between perception and reality than shorebirds.

Late July into August in the midwestern United States is as good a place as any to experience the head-scratching wonder of shorebird migration. By the time the dog days roll around, the birds, who had passed by us heading northward in flood fueled by hormones and insect larva only three months earlier, are now trickling back south in confusingly variable plumages, with varying degrees of wear, preferring to congregate on low, hot, muddy arms of reservoirs just beyond the range of our little Bausch & Lomb Discoverer scope (a fine scope for under $200, I still say). This is where the rubber meets the road, where perception and reality collide, where you realize just how much you don’t know about identifying birds.

For dad and me, that place of reckoning was Stockton Lake, a old Corp of Engineers job about halfway to Kansas City, and specifically an arm of that lake near the tiny town of Aldrich. To say there wasn’t much there would be an enormous understatement, the town was of the classic “one-stoplight” variety, and that intersection hosted a pair of competing gas stations on opposite corners and trailer park on a third. But hang a right and head down the road towards the water and you soon come to a dirt road that runs parallel to an arm of the lake which, in late summer when water is pumped out to supplement the water supply of a thirsty Springfield, becomes an expansive mudflat, irresistible to shorebirds.

The shorebirds were there, not yet in huge numbers but enough to make a novice birder suddenly very aware of his novicehood make an instant reappraisal of his skill. There may have been some rarities out there, who knows really, but in the end we were happy to come to grips with the common birds; the dapper Semipalmated Plovers, the entirely average Semipalmated Sandpipers, and the comparatively hulking Pectoral Sandpipers, the species to which we would eventually compare all other, less-expected species of shorebirds. So, for that reason, it’s good to get these three out of the way.

Which I suppose is a roundabout way of saying, for new shorebird identifiers, this is all you get right now, so you better enjoy them.

PESA from wikipedia