Long-billed Dowitcher

Otherwise known as the red one.

Mary Jo found a Long-billed Dowitcher on Friday in the central county, kudos to her for going around and checking for little flooded fields.  It was still there midday Saturday.  Dowitchers can be hard to separate as most of the characters have at least some overlap.  This one has a fairly long bill, and has a decent amount of more brick reddish breeding plumage so the overall gestault is certainly of Long-billed.

Another gestault characteristic is the loral stripe.

 Long-billed on average has the supercilium (white line between the cheek and the cap) run more or less straight into the lore whereas Short-billed has a more marked angle down.  Again there's overlap, and you have to be careful because there's probably some degrees of this that are dependent upon the bird's posture, but it's another useful thing to look at.  The above pics are with the camera, the rest are video-grabs while phone-scoping to get some more magnification.

The tail is one of the more traditional field marks, typically white with thin black bars in Short-billed and at least 50-50 or more black than white in Long-billed.  This bird is at least 50-50 to my eyes.  This is hard to see in the field, but useful with the camera.

There's a few more useful plumage characters.  The breeding scapulars in Long-billed frequently show bright white ends whereas Short-billed is more marbled with yellow-orangish.  The white scapular tips showed up best in the 2nd pic; this next one got a little over-exposed and washed-out, but is the sharpest.

Hopefully this is the beginning of the floodgates!

Re-learning the dowitchers

I'm used to seeing the dowitchers in near breeding plumage in the spring and then the still-bright adults and fresh juveniles in the fall.  It took a little getting used to the late winter birds along the Florida coast.  Almost all were just starting to get some breeding plumage.

Most of the birds (and I believe all of the birds in flight in the next 2 pics) are Short-billed, as would be expected on the salty beach.

This second flight shot is one of my favorite pics from the trip, but it loses a lot at the smaller file size used on the blog.

Some however were Long-billed's, I think this bird's tail is certainly predominantly black enough to for the less common species (though per the orange O'Brien shorebird book the Atlantic subspecies of Short-billed has a darker tail on average than the central Hendersoni that I'm more used to).

The round body and flattish eye stripe of this next bird definitely gave me a Long-billed sense in the field though I don't know that this single frame is definitive.

I'm pretty sure this next one is Long-billed as well, but its tail is not as dark as the earlier bird's.

When the cat is gone...

I read an article in an old Birding (I think) magazine where one of the west coast guys makes an allusion to the lions which make the kills and the hyenas and jackals which arrive later to try to steal some dinner. Tim, our local lion, has been out of the county for a week and Andre has been on fire lately trying to grow a mane. Between work and having the kids by myself this weekend, I've been in full jackal mode, my only birding in the last few days chasing a Baird's Andre found yesterday and Long-billed Dowitchers he found tonight.

Here's the three Long-billed Dowitchers.

The bird on the right is basically callable based on the bill alone which is saying something since there's a lot of overlap between the two species. These birds are pretty close to full breeding plumage (there still are some wing coverts coming in, and the birds aren't fully red back to the rear-most flanks). There is more than enough warm coloration, though, to know that the only candidates are Hendersoni Short-billed Dowitcher (the subspecies we get), or Long-billed. These pics aren't the greatest; once I get a digi-scoping camera back this would been a good chance for Pepsi challenge photos between full-frame digi-scope and these heavy crops from the 300mm lens. However, they do show enough of the upperparts to evaluate one of the easier ways to separate the two in spring. Long-billed has dark scapulars with some fine rufous markings and some contrasting white tips. Short-billed has broader gold markings in the scapulars.

Honestly, I'd bet you could guess the ID of dowitchers in Michigan at about a 95% clip based on dates alone, the first week or so of May are Long-billed. The 3rd week of May is Short-billed. In the fall, July and August are Short-billed, September could be either, October is Long-billed.

Dowitcher dilemma

It was a sunny morning at last so I figured I'd take one last shot at a decent Smith's longspur shot given that they'll probably be a thousand miles north by my next day off. To make a long story short, I never even saw, much less photographed, one today. The birds weren't moving around very much.

On Avery Road there was, however, a big flock of shorebirds well off the road including about a hundred lesser yellowlegs, about 40 pectorals, and 2 dowitchers. We see this one in nice early morning light, with fairly brick reddish underparts with some difficult-to-characterize patterning to the underparts with dark scapulars with some internal reddish markings and whitish scapular tips:

I don't have much experience with dowitchers in spring. Probably 99% of the dowitchers I've seen are July and August SB dowitchers (of the central Hendersoni subspecies) at Pt Mouillee.

The pics aren't great as the birds were very distant. Between the 60x zoom of the scope, probably 2-3x on the camera (something I don't usually do), plus cropping, these are probably 100-200x. Even with the best of equipment a person would run out of photons.

None of my pics captured the bill that well, though it's accepted that there is a fair amount of overlap. I was not overly-impressed, though, by the length of the bill. LB dowitcher is supposed to be chunkier than SB, "like it swallowed a grapefruit" is the description in the Karlson shorebird guide. I think that would be more helpful if I'd had more recent comparative experience with them. Obviously this character is better evaluated in the field than in single pictures. It looks chunkier in the first pic than the second.

In terms of general plumage, it's considerably darker than the post-breeding adults I'm used to seeing, but that could probably apply nearly as well to a fresh SB than allow us to jump to the conclusion that it's LB, though I think it shades in favor of LB.

Sibley points out LB as having scapulars with rufous bars and white tips whereas SB has bold gold barring. Karlson describes LB's scapulars similarly, notes bright upperparts of SB, and does show photos that are consistent with Sibley's paintings. The Hayman shorebird guide also illustrates this difference in the paintings (though in the descriptions he describes SB as having broad rufous or rusty-buff or pale cinnamon edges to the feathers - but at least says the edging is broad). Kaufman in Advanced Birding emphasizes that the broad edging to SB's scaps make the bird appear very bright (though gives the color to this edging as rusty). My bird's upperparts, dark with rufous marbling with narrow white tips, I think are definitely in the LB camp.

Of my 4 resources, Karlson, Hayman, and Kaufman all emphasise the pattern of the underparts (Sibley is the only one that gives equal weight to the upperparts).

All agree that Hendersoni SB dowitcher should have a clean "fore"neck without patterning whereas LB has streaking in that region. I'm not sure I've ever seen a definition for "fore"neck. I think the first picture shows some streaking in this region, but it's so distant that I think it's hard to draw firm conclusions.

Hayman and Karlson both state that SB had fairly evenly distributed markings from the sides of the breast through the flanks, whereas LB has denser markings along the side of the breast which are more lightly distributed along the flanks. I think distance makes it hard to argue strongly either way. Sibley and Kaufman note that the patterning of the sides of the breast tends toward spotting in SB and barring in LB. Distance makes the bird look somewhat in-between. When I first looked at the photos I thought it showed spotting along the sides of the breast, but when I looke closer, the marks appear more chevron shaped.

I went back and forth earlier in the day on the ID of these birds. My initial gestault impression in the field was that these looked like long-billed dowitchers, though not the longest-billed I've ever seen. I didn't feel totally comfortable with the call initially given that I don't have a ton of experience with the plumage of spring dowitchers, but after having gone through my resources and compared them with my pics, I now feel that these are long-billed's.

Sept 09 Addendum: here's a Jean Irons photoeassy about this same question.