San Diego Shorebirds

Berrien county is certainly a fun place to bird. However, if there's one drawback often noted (besides winter of course), it's that there's very few respectable mudflats. There's even fewer tidal mudflats. That's not really a problem when birding the San Diego River.

Here's a long-billed curlew from earlier this evening:
And another from yesterday evening:

The whimbrel, while it appears huge at Tiscornia beach has about half the bulk of its larger cousin:

Marbled godwits actually seem much bigger here than they do at Tiscornia, perhaps because they allow closer approach when there's a narrow channel separating it from you. This one finished a prolonged preening session with probably 2 minutes of scratching its chin:

Finally a break from the large shorebird theme of the blog, a black turnstone which appeared out of nowhere foraging past the edge of the mudflat where I was hunkered down. This one was a lifer, and quite away from the rocky ocean-side habitat I expected it:

While this post might not suggest it, I spent the bulk of my birding time this morning photographing Western Sandpipers given that they're back on the Michigan review list and abundant here, but that'll be a post for another time...