Migrant shorebirds are still passing through, and before this movement
ends southward movements of others will have already started. Ohio has
few breeding shorebirds. There are intriguing but apocryphal reports of
nesting solitary sandpipers and lesser yellowlegs, and piping plover
nests disappeared here long ago, but we do have large numbers of
breeding killdeers and woodcocks, fewer snipes, vanishing upland
sandpipers, the occasional Wilson's phalarope, and a single record for
the black-necked stilt. And the most interesting of all, the common but
often overlooked spotted sandpiper...
        Howard Eskin offers a nice gallery of photos of this species at
http://www.howardsview.com/SpottedSandpiper/SpottedSandpiper.html
. Study of this bird during the summer is very rewarding, and
fascinating in many ways. First of all, like a number of shorebird
species (but uniquely in Ohio) it is polyandrous: the female courts
with, and lays four eggs apiece for, a number of males, and leaves
incubation duties to them while she defends the whole territory. Young
birds can run and swim half an hour after hatching. Spotties have many
distinctive behaviors, like their gait and feeding methods, their unique
flight characteristics (including "flying" underwater [see
http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v111n01/p0190-p0191.pdf ]), their
disinclination to flock with other birds, and their ability to perch
like sparrows atop marsh vegetation or even on utility wires. All these
quirky and often charming behaviors can be seen in summer here if you
take the time to watch this very successful bird.
        A. C. Bent has 19 pages of authoritative and very readable material on
this species in Part Two of "Life Histories of North American Shore
Birds" (1927). As far as I can tell, the full text of this publication
is no longer freely available on the Web, but is in libraries and can be
picked up in used-book stores if you're lucky. If anyone knows of a
complete text on line that anyone can read, please let us know. (And oh,
yeah, I know about the BNA).
Bill Whan
Columbus




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