Monroe County, MI

The legs on this bird are truly ridiculous. And the color scheme! You could put this bird front and center in a ballet and it would fit right in.

I’d had black-necked stilt on my wishlist for months and gave myself a tension headache squinting through my binoculars at the mudflats of Pointe Mouilee, scanning acres of birdless waterlilies in breathless anticipation (it was also very hot, which may have contributed to the breathlessness). Finally, after what felt very much like a nature-coded Where’s Waldo, I spotted one tucked in near a copse of dead trees. The one in the photograph here was busy supervising its gangly cotton ball of a baby, which can be seen just to its left.

New birds never get old. Somehow, no matter how much I’ve built up anticipation for a particular bird, seeing it in person is always even better than I’d hoped. I could’ve watched this graceful pair pick their way across the marsh all day.

Like any good community, birding comes with a lot of unapproachable jargon. ‘Lifers’; ‘fluddles’; referring to birds by their four-letter banding codes instead of their names (PIPL for piping plover, etc.); inscrutable nicknames for beloved birding spots that don’t appear on any map. As a rule, these linguistic contortions serve mostly to make things confusing for non-bird people, and for us to be able to identify each other. Classic in-group out-group stuff.

One notable exception to this is the universal birder habit of referring to shorebirds as “shorbs” which is, obviously, delightful, and a net gain of good to the world.

The yellowlegs is a quintessential Michigan shorb. Don’t ask me how I know that this one is a lesser yellowlegs and not a greater, because I have no idea and no advice except to surround yourself with people who are good at shorebirds, so they can do the ID for you.

The great joy of photographing Caspian Terns in flight is that they fly relatively slowly and mostly along predictable trajectories, which is a particular blessing for me because my camera has no fancy functionality for tracking subjects in motion. We saw several dozen Caspians on this day in mid-August (no common or black terns, alas), mostly in a flotilla in Mouilee’s Cell 3 but some out and about. This one was very patient and kept circling back over our convoy, giving me plenty of opportunities for a decent shot.