With the thoughts of birders all over the northern hemisphere turning to migrant shorebirds, I thought I’d post a photo I took a few years ago of a shorebird that really got me stumped for a while. Once you know what it is the identification becomes very obvious (like one of those trompe d’oeil paintings that were once so so popular) but at the time I found working out what this bird was quite an education, for reasons I’ll explain further down the post. Suffice to say at the moment that the photo was taken at this time of year (the first week of September) and in North America.

I’m sure that some experts amongst us (I’m thinking particularly of Jochen here) recognised this bird right away, but for the rest of us how about another clue? The photo was taken at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in California during what I later discovered was quite an influx of this particular long-distance migrant, a species that breeds in the Arctic regions of North America and Eurasia and winters at sea on tropical oceans. So what do you think?

What we have here is a juvenile Red-necked Phalarope Phalaropus lobatus which is moulting into non-breeding plumage (note the few grey scapulars). The bird has been badly oiled, which is probably almost the sole reason that it is on the land rather than out on the water where most birders would expect to see migrant phalaropes: in fact this was the first phalarope in over twenty years of birding that I’d seen preening on land. When I first saw this particular bird I’d actually just come from photographing a flock of about 50 Red-necked Phalaropes swimming and feeding out on a lagoon about 400m away from this isolated individual. You’d think that after seeing so many not ten minutes before I’d have recognised it immediately, but I didn’t: not only was I thrown by the odd plumage - which was of course caused by oil staining - but I just wasn’t expecting to see a phalarope on land, so the bird simply didn’t “fit” the mental picture of the species that I was used to using.

Birding is constantly throwing up puzzles for us to solve, and it’s worth bearing in mind that many of them involve regularly occurring species that don’t quite look right because of plumage anomalies or because they are in locations or habitats that are unexpected. I certainly won’t ever forget that phalaropes don’t always present themselves as little birds spinning in circles way out in a bay or lagoon…

For more photos of Red-necked Phalaropes have a look here