We were at Mosquito Reservoir around noon and saw what we believed to be 4 Red 
Phalaropes.  There were pretty far, even looking through the scope and were in 
the general vicinity of a large group of Bonaparte's Gulls.  That is what we 1st 
thought they were but they were somewhat apart from the gulls and they just 
looked different.  Our biggest problem to just saying they were phalaropes stems 
from them seeming to be the same size as the gulls.  But I don't think we ever 
got a good comparison with something we could definitely tell was a gull and so 
weren't sure if there was maybe several more phalaropes than the 4.  But the 4 
we could see the best really seemed to sit higher in the water & had longer 
necks.  The bills seemed longer & thinner than a gull's bill would be but not by 
much and again, they were really far away, so we coudn't be too sure we were 
seeing the bills well enough to tell.  For me, the most telling field mark was 
it looked like there was a solid black area from the eye back towards the back 
of the head and it looked wide.  The top of the heads appeared to be all white 
with little to no dark coloring but I never got a look from the back of the 
birds.  They stayed in profile the whole time.  The most interesting thing was 
the way they fed.  No, no spinning in circles...that would have made it too 
easy.  These guys would just tip up with their rear ends in the air, much like a 
mallard, but much quicker.  They would rock down & back up all in one motion.  
When they were tipped, it looked like their tail was black, or was it the wing 
tips of a gull we were seeing?  None of the other birds in the vicinity did that 
even once.  We could tell the gulls were Bonies partly because they would also 
fly around and we could see the white leading edge of the wings.  These 4 guys 
never flew.  But they did look different.

We finally decided we couldn't be sure enough to call them Red Phalaropes, or 
phalaropes of any kind for that matter.  But does anyone else have any 
thoughts?  Is it too late in the year for phalaropes to be passing through?  Is 
it possible we couldn't tell size difference accurately if the phalaropes & 
gulls weren't close together?  Is that feeding behavior definitive of either of 
those birds?  And can anyone else confirm, one way or the other, whether they 
were Bonapartes or phalaropes?

Laura Dornan
Stark Co


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