Greater Yellowlegs
Photo courtesy of Sharon Milligan
(Seaman Rd Lagoon on MCAS field trip 01/30/2016)
(If you would like to learn more about Judy, and see more of Sharon's photos, click on the blue title above where you can read previously posted articles)
A "life bird'' is one that a birder sees for the very
first time. Those new to birding, if they bird with any regularity, rack up
lifers very quickly. The first 200 or so species come easily, and then the law
of diminishing returns sets in. A birder finds himself in familiar territory
with increasingly familiar birds, and lifers grow scarcer and scarcer.
If birding were all about life birds, it would become terribly dull. I
remember a time with a large group of beginning birders for whom I was conducting
what amounts to a show-and-tell session of shorebirds. I would focus my
spotting scope on a particular individual, and the observers would line up to
see it. I had a nice little Lesser Yellowlegs dead center in the scope, and the
novices were taking turns looking at it. I was dismayed when one of the group
stood aside and said, "I've already seen it.'' She did not raise her
binoculars to study the "legs'' on her own, nor did she refer to a field guide
to underscore what she had been told she had seen.
In all the years I've been teaching, I've become quite good at
separating novices into two categories: those who are in it just for "collecting'' purposes, and those who early on realize that seeing a bird for
the first time is only the beginning. The latter want to see a species again
and again until they know it well. And even then, they don't grow tired of it.
They get their own kicks from recognizing a Lesser Yellowlegs without
help. They develop skills that help to separate a "lesserlegs'' from the
similar Greater Yellowlegs, on their own.
Along with skills in identification of the birds that cooperate by
staying in the open to allow for good views, this latter category of novices
find themselves able to call the same bird in flight or to recognize it by its
flight notes.
Soon these novices realize that there are more of both "legs'' on the
Coast during spring and fall migrations, and that finding them in winter is a
crap shoot. The birders become aware that a winter yellowlegs looks different
from a legs in adult summer plumage.
They show interest in the behavior and the biology of the Lesser
Yellowlegs or, for that matter, any given species. They discover the romance of
birds far beyond what a bird looks like.
As time goes on, they become aware that Lesser Yellowlegs are more
sociable than Greater Yellowlegs and that the lesser, when feeding, is more of
a picker than the greater, which often swishes its bill in a back-and-forth
motion. They see (often without realizing how very much they are seeing) that
the lesserlegs could be said to be "delicate'', a word that does not rightly
apply to the greaterlegs. They learn that the lesser is much more "approachable'' (but still a wary bird) than the greater.
After experiencing both yellowlegs throughout the course of a year or
more, they take note that the Lesser Yellowlegs is more likely to shy away from
open beaches than is the greater but that both are found, often side by side,
in shallow ponds and impoundments and along marshy edges. And it may come as a
surprise to learn that both yellowlegs eat insects along with crustaceans,
small fishes and worms.
Along the way they become aware that both yellowlegs are "head
bobbers". Curiosity about other head bobbers may lead them to discover the
obvious, which is that most head-bobbers are in the same genus (Tringa), and
that head-bobbing is a characteristic behavior. That knowledge may help when,
someday in a faraway place, they may come across a Redshank or a Greenshank or
a Wood Sandpiper, all of which are closely related to the birds we birders call "legs".
They might, having conquered the identification challenge by a
combination of sight, sound, season, habitat and behavior, become taken with
other aspects of the Lesser Yellowlegs (and by inference, any other bird), such
as its history and its courtship rituals, mating, nesting, raising young and so
forth.
Should the birder ever come across a shorebird decoy in an antiques
store, it may come as a shock, but the elegant little yellowlegs once was a
popular gamebird: "at time exceedingly tame; it decoys very easily, returns
again and again to the slaughter, and its little body is so small that many
lives must be sacrificed to make a decent bag.''
Imagination might be captured by knowing that the lesserlegs breeds in
loose colonies in muskegs north of the lower 48, in Alaska and the central
prairie provinces of Canada, even to areas north of the Arctic Circle. And that
it is probable that both sexes incubate the eggs and brood the young, in a nest
that is little more than a depression in the ground, lined with the dry leaves
of poplars and aspens.
One might learn that they are at times secretive (during mating and
nesting) and at other times exhibitionists (giving distraction displays once
young are out of the nest). And that, at a time of year when the demands of
nesting are over and food is plentiful, they fight among each other, seemingly
as a diversion, doing no real damage, until one surrenders by crouching down in
front of the other.
The habit of migrating south about a month ahead of its offspring is
common to most species of shorebirds, including the lesserlegs. Somehow or
other, the youngsters find their own way, some of them all the way to southern
South America.
That, to me, is one of the most fascinating things, but one wonders why
it should be so.
The Lesser Yellowlegs, one
among several thousand species of birds in the world, is so much more than the
sum of its parts and so much more than a tick on a life list. And the birder
who learns that is a birder to the core.
(This article was published in the Sun Herald in February 1995)
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