It’s always exciting to photograph Whimbrels and Red Knots because they are bigger and rarer than most shorebirds, like Western Sandpipers or Dunlin, but my favorite part of birding during Spring or Fall Migration is actually when smaller sandpipers completely surround me .
To make that happen, you need to be standing on the beach long before they arrive and stand very still, becoming part of the scenery. On this visit, that meant we were on the beach by 6:00 AM, just after sunrise.
While the Whimbrels, Dowitchers, Red Knots, and Black-Bellied Plovers maintained their distance feeding at the water’s edge,
Western Sandpipers covered the beach, skittering here and there, eating only God-Knows-What.
They come so close that you almost need a zoom lens to fit them into the frame.
You obviously don’t have to stand perfectly still, or you wouldn’t be able to get pictures like this, but sometimes something as subtle as a camera click can startle them into flight. And it should go without saying that the last thing you want to do while birding is scare them into flight since these little guys migrate up to 6,000 miles to breed.
It’s not unusual to end up with more blurry shots than focused because they seldom slow down, but sometimes you get lucky, and they will pose for a series of shots like this Dunlin and Western Sandpiper did.
I wish I had experienced the Spring or Fall Migration when I worked in Aberdeen nearly sixty years ago. If I had, I hope that I would’ve returned to the area much more often than I have over the years, because it is a powerful experience with or without a camera. For me, it is probably the ultimate meditation, one that calls to mind a saying we practice in Spring Forest Qigong, one that I translate as “I am in the universe, the universe is in me, we are One.”