Piping Plover

12 August 2014. Hamilton, ON. It’s a little hard to reconcile quite why today’s Piping Plover should be my Bird of the Day. My mental test, that whenever or wherever I go birding, there’s always at least one bird that stands out, one bird that makes me say Wow! was satisfied.  The plover qualified but today’s sighting came at a price.The bird was about 400 metres away and barely discernable, even through a telescope. I did manage to see it, but with difficulty. It was way back picking and poking around a drying mud flat along with a mob of loafing Caspian Terns. A stiff wind made the telescope vibrate so the image was frustratingly erratic; you had to know what you were looking at; or at least believe what you’d been told.

On the plus side: Piping Plovers are a rarity in southern Ontario, and the very few known nest sites are carefully protected. It’s a plover, which immediately places it in an agreeably handsome family, and one of the engagingly pretty little ones too, along with the pale and diminutive Snowy Plover (known in Europe as the Kentish Plover.)

Last year we watched a nesting pair of Piping Plovers in an area of fenced-off beach where it was protected from wandering families, sunbathers and un-leashed dogs; It was not a very satisfying experience from a birder’s point of view. Previous to that I had enjoyed a very close encounter with a male at the edge of a shoreline pond in Cape May, New Jersey. I took my first ‘for the record’ photo when it was about a hundred metres distant and kept on clicking as it wandered closer and closer. Eventually it was picking at flies and other invertebrates barely five metres from me, and not in the least concerned by my presence.

Here are a two shots from the encounter with that charming little bird.