[SBB] New Chicago Marsh phalarope pix, plus...

["Tom Grey" <[[email protected]]>]

Yesterday morning early, I headed north along the tracks crossing the EEC
entry road in Alviso between 7 and 9. My big hope was to get some pictures
of phalaropes before they lost all their color. These little guys turn out
to be a lot more wary of someone toting a big white lens than are, say,
Least Sandpipers. Wouldn't get me get close to them with the sun behind me.
(British airmen during WW1 coined the phrase "the Hun in the sun," to
describe the Red Baron and his colleagues, who copied the avian predator's
strategy of approaching prey out of the sun.)

But I did manage a few distant shots that weren't hopelessly bad. Here's a
pretty bad one of the one of the few WILSON'S PHALAROPES I saw with
substantial breeding color left (the dark crown stripe makes this a bright
male, no?):
http://www.pbase.com/tgrey/image/46706749

Here's a molted WILSON'S, this one with a pretty short bill -- I maybe 40
of these:
http://www.pbase.com/tgrey/image/46706660

Here's one of the brighter RED-NECKED PHALAROPES I was able to capture with
a distant shot. I saw maybe 200 birds of this species, many with at least
some color left:
http://www.pbase.com/tgrey/image/46706645

Here was one that surprised me -- isn't this a juvenile RED-NECKED
PHALAROPE? If I'm right about that, it might have been the only one of this
age I saw:
http://www.pbase.com/tgrey/image/46706655

While wandering around in the muck and the salt-grass, I was able to get a
couple of nicer shots of those familiar photographers' models, the Least
Sandpipers and American Avocets -- pix visible in the gallery,
http://www.pbase.com/tgrey/latest.

Tom Grey









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