Birds of the Beach

[dragoness_e]

I spent some time trying to identify the shorebirds in the pictures I took last weekend, and I was more-or-less successful.


Dark-phase juvenile Parasitic Jaegar? (Stercorarius parasiticus) Or Heerman's Gull?


This guy was just sitting on his own private sandhill on the beach. I'm not sure whether he's a dark-phase young Parasitic Jaegar, or a young Heerman's Gull. There's a lot of the latter on the beach, but he's much darker than the other juvenile gulls I photographed. Also, Jaegars are solitary birds, and he struck me as aggressively "leave me alone!" solitary.

Juvenile Sanderlings (Calidris alba)


I mentioned these guys before. They're still adorable the way they chase the waves in and out!

Unidentified bird -- Hudsonian Godwit?


I still don't know what this guy is. I'm favoring a juvenile or non-breeding adult Hudsonian Godwit (Limosa haemastica)

Seagull Rookery


This rookery turned out to be a mix of Heerman's gulls and Western gulls, adults and juveniles. The sooty-looking gulls are the Heerman's gulls.

Adult Heerman's Gull (Larus heermanni)


Pair of adult Western gulls (Larus occidentalis)


Juvenile Heerman's gull


Juvenile Western gull


Western gull, and Common Raven (Corvus corax)


The ravens hung around the fringes of the rookery; I hear they're looking for tender young hatchlings to eat. As you can see, they are a very large corvid; seagull-sized.

A pair of phalaropes


Last and least, these guys were foraging in the freshwater stream that trickled along the base of the cliff from the "bathing pool" mentioned in my previous post. I'm not sure what they are, beyond some flavor of Phalarope--either Red or Red-Necked.

Comments

[darkfire-blade.livejournal.com]

Oh wow great pictures. I particularly like the one of the juvenile sanderlings wandering in the waves. ^^ Nice job with identifying all of them too!