by Frank Keim
When you see this large sandpiper up close, you’ve got to marvel at nature’s creative ingenuity. With their slender stilt-like legs and long slightly upturned bills, they are truly graceful shorebirds. Their golden brown and cinnamon-red breeding plumage is just short of stunning. If you’re lucky, you’ll spot them wading through boreal bogs and tidal mudflats probing deep in the mud for invertebrates with their flexible bills that allow them to easily grasp their prey hiding deep in the thick mud. Those prey include marine worms, clams and other bivalves, fiddler crabs and small crustaceans such as amphipods. They also feed on larval and adult beetles, grasshoppers, flies and mosquitoes, plus snails, earthworms, small tubers, seeds, and berries.
After migrating north from their winter habitat in South America, they head for the marshes and muskeg north of Anchorage and those of the Yukon Delta, where they arrive in late April, often before the snow has melted from the tundra. The male then finds a suitable nesting territory and immediately begins his courtship ritual. Beating his wings rapidly and calling, he spirals upward several hundred feet, then begins what one witness describes as “an exaggerated butterfly display, beating his wings slowly above the level of his body, rocking side by side, and singing, then gliding with his wings held upswept in a V-shape.”
He then points his bill downward, folds his wings and drops straight down, pulling out of his freefall about 30 feet above the ground, finally gliding to the top of a stunted tree or hummock, fanning his tail and raising a wing as if to invite any watching female to his side. If there is one, and she seems interested, he may dive toward her, opening his wings to make a winnowing sound a little like that of a diving snipe. He may also face into the wind and hover over his territory, often pursuing females in flight. When the female makes her choice, the pair may join together in displays in which they fly with downward-arched trembling wings, calling for all others to hear.
Males are highly territorial, and drive away rival males in flight or by fighting them on the ground. When peace and harmony finally reign, the female selects the nest site from a series of shallow scrapes made by both birds on drier parts of the nesting territory. The scrape is usually set on a dry hummock in a sedge marsh or on a large tundra tussock with dwarf birch or other shrubs nearby. It is well hidden and sparsely lined with twigs, dead leaves, sedges, mosses and lichens, and other vegetative materials.
After laying four dark olive-gray, brown speckled eggs, both parents help during incubation, which lasts about 25 days. After the eggs hatch, the downy chicks leave the nest soon afterward. Both parents also help tend the chicks until they fledge about a month later, a trait that is uncommon among shorebird species. This, in spite of the young being able to walk, swim and find their own food almost immediately after leaving the nest.
Before migrating south in July, family groups gather into flocks in nesting areas. While the adults are fattening up, their plumage changes to a subtle gray-brown. As with other godwit species, they leave before their young who hang around about three weeks longer to feverishly put on a few more ounces of fat. Then in large flocks they too head southeast for the Plains provinces of central Canada, where they will continue staging for their incredible long-distance odyssey to South America. They do this completely on their own without any guidance from their elders. Like their parents, they will fly almost nonstop from Canada across the U.S. and the Caribbean Sea to northern South America, and then all the way down to Uruguay, Argentina and the south coast of Chile, where they will arrive in September, a total of almost 10,000 miles!
To accomplish this amazing feat, they do what their Bar-tailed cousins do. Just ahead of migration they double their weight in fat reserves, and double or triple the size of their heart, lungs and pectoral muscles to provide them with more flight power. At the same time, to compensate for their increased weight, they shrink their gizzards, intestines, livers and kidneys. After arriving at their destination, they readjust so they can begin feeding again. And, you ask, how do they rest while traveling nonstop for such long distances? Again, they do the same as their godwit cousins do. They sleep while they fly, the two sides of their brain taking turns so the birds can stay alert.
The sandpiper’s Yup’ik name is the same as that for the Bar-tailed godwit, Tevateguaq (the Yukon River area, including Scammon Bay), Teguteguaq (Hooper Bay), and Tevatevaaq (Canineq/western Kuskokwim Bay area), all three names referring to something with special food value. This, because in July young Yup’ik hunters traditionally hunted these birds and presented them to their elders as special gifts.
The bird’s English name is a combination of its distinctive cry, gawd wiiit, and Hudson Bay in N.E. Canada, where the species was first identified. Its scientific name, Limosa haemastica, means blood-colored sandpiper that feeds in mud. The genus name, Limosa, is from Latin, meaning, “muddy,” and the species name, haemastica, is from ancient Greek, meaning “bloody.”
The bird has had many English folk names, including, ring-tailed marlin, referring to its tail band and its long bill, which looks like the bill of a marlin fish; and goose bird, referring to its large size for a shorebird.
Since its winter home is in South America, its Spanish name is Aguja café, meaning brown needle, referring to its long needle-like bill.
As with so many other species that nest in northern coastal areas, their numbers have been threatened by activities associated with oil and gas exploitation. In addition, en route to their winter homes, hunting has been detrimental. Changes in habitats and prey availability due to climate change in arctic and subarctic regions will also continue to be a conservation threat into the future.
