The Mast-Head: At Water’s Edge

A treasure as July slips into August is that the shorebirds arrive as suddenly as the calendar’s turn. Shorebirds, for those unfamiliar with the term, are the thin-legged birds that make their living along the water’s edge or on flats at low tide, at least around here. There are inland species as well, those that favor farm fields and grasslands, but we know those that find their feast by the sea.

The late Peter Matthiessen called them collectively wind birds, whose wistful calls, he thought, made them the most affecting of wild creatures. I recommend the beautifully illustrated “The Shorebirds of North America,” for which he wrote the text, to anyone interested in diving deep into their world.

On a weekday evening this week, I took a more portable bird guide and my father’s old but still clear Navy binoculars down to the Gardiner’s Bay beach. Setting up a beach chair, I put the book in my lap and scanned the low-tide edge. For about an hour, I sat there and looked. There were some birds whose names I knew; others were unfamiliar. And in that, at least for me, lies the charm of watching birds, not knowing and slowing down the day long enough to look for the tiniest clues.

It is still early in terms of the massive shorebird migrations to come, and the vanguard I saw seemed to go about their work on the sand without urgency. A whimbrel, buff-colored with slight mottling and a moderately long downturned beak, was picking at sand crabs in the company of a lesser yellowlegs. A ruddy turnstone, stouter than the other two, and with its characteristicpatches of bronze and black, wandered among the exposed rockweed as black-backed gulls tore into spider crabs they had just caught. Farther off, several semipalmated plovers, smaller than the others, dashed back and forth.

There were other shorebirds in the distance, too far away to see. That I might be able on another day to figure out what they were is something to look forward to.