I don’t see Whimbrels very often and was particularly disappointed when we didn’t see them during our recent visit to Bodega Bay. Reading that Whimbrels had been spotted at Bottle Beach several days before helped me decide it was worth going to the beach even if the main shorebird migration was over.
I was disappointed with the poor shot of a Whimbrel I got the previous night, so I was excited to get much better shots early the next morning, even if they were taken at a considerable distance.
This shot is heavily cropped, but even at 800 mm, the Whimbrel seemed remarkably sharp.
It certainly helped that the sun was at our backs, and since it was right after sunrise, the light was still slightly golden.
I’ve managed to get quite close to Whimbrels at Bodega Bay, but they’ve always stayed further out at Bottle Beach, so I was pleasantly surprised when this one kept getting closer,
closer,
and, finally, so close that I barely had to crop the photo.
Usually when you take a sequence of shots over time you end up simply deleting most of the early shots because the shots get better and better as the bird gets closer. I didn’t do that this time, though, because I liked the first shot because it showed how much larger a Whimbrel is than a Dowitcher, and the second shot had a nice reflection.