Willet

Royal Botanical Gardens Arboretum, Hamilton, Ontario. August 30 2020. Some birders make a weekend out of following up reports of others’ notable bird sightings. Just before lunch, I met a couple who had already logged about 200km chasing sightings in central Ontario.  They were far from home with more leads to follow. For their troubles they had seen a Buff-breasted Sandpiper (a good find) but missed a Western Sandpiper. I may have added joy to their day by pointing them in the direction of a Willet that I had found just an hour earlier.

The Willet caught my eye as I was doing one of our just-restarted fall transects. The morning had been rather slow going as far as species numbers and mix were concerned, but entertaining with a couple of young Bald Eagles playing aerial acrobatics, a Great Egret softening up a catfish meal, and squabbling Caspian Terns.

The Willet was an identification challenge and I spent quite a few minutes going through my mental rolodex. For a while I couldn’t shake the word whimbrel from my mind, I knew it was wrong. But W… W… W-something?

A Willet is a notable but not totally unexpected migrant, a handful are seen here most years. The question that puzzled me later was, to which of two subspecies, Eastern or Western, do our birds belong?  The Eastern breeds along the Atlantic on coastal flatlands anywhere from Virginia north to Newfoundland, then winters on open mudflats and beaches almost anywhere south of that, including the Gulf of Mexico.  The Western subspecies is a bit more widespread and breeds in the vast centre of the North American continent, and spends its winters on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, from California or Virginia south including tropical South America.

In all likelihood today’s bird was a Western Willet on its way from somewhere far inland to the Atlantic coast. Perhaps to spend its winter dodging the throngs of winter escapees on Florida beaches.

On first meeting, a Willet is a conspicuously large but rather plain shorebird, especially a post-breeding one like this. At any time of year, they are a long-legged bird about the same colour as the mudflats. But all is forgiven when they fly, whistling loudly in alarm and exposing beautiful, bold, under-wing panels in black and white.  My thanks to Andrew Mactavish for this revealing photo.

It was unquestioningly my Bird of the Day.