Lesser Yellowlegs

Royal Botanical Gardens. Carrols Bay, Burlington. ON. September 4. 2022. You know about trigger warnings don’t you? Well this Bird of the Day story may be hard on sensitive souls, it’s about short life and ugly death in the mud.

Mid-afternoon today, a message about some interesting shorebird arrivals caught my interest and sent me off to an expanse of wet and gooey mudflats about twenty minutes from home. In the absence of birds, I don’t normally give these mudflats two minutes of my time, there’s far too much anthropomorphic debris and discard there. But today I had some hope of seeing reported Stilt Sandpipers and maybe a Red Knot (but failed on both) and maybe Short-billed Dowitchers (success) as well as Least and Semi–palmated Sandpipers, Semi–palmated Plovers, and Lesser and Greater Yellowlegs. All of the last noted were there, as they had been for a few days. (‘Semi-palmated’, by the way, is a reference to the presence of some webbing between the toes. Useful for pattering around on soft silts.) These birds are all south-bound migrants making a refuelling stop having already flown several hundreds of kilometres from their Arctic breeding grounds.

With a quick binocular scan I could see dozens, maybe hundreds of birds and, mysteriously, one unusually low in the water as if it had wandered out of its depth into too deep water and had decided to stop and think about it for a while. I couldn’t make out what it was, surely too low for a shorebird most of whom stay well up on long legs, and not a duck, who are larger and always buoyant; this mystery bird seemed to be anything but buoyant.

I was relieved to see it take flight and pleased when it flew closer to me, I was really keen to see what bird would behave in this manner. It came to rest a short distance away, and rather than alight as I’d expected it to, it belly flopped onto mud, wings splayed (above).

Now I understood, an injured bird.  In fact I could now see it was an injured Lesser Yellowlegs.  What befell it is anyone’s guess but I’m certain that it had lost the use of one or maybe both legs; in the picture you may just be able to  make out its yellow leg splayed out to the right, not where it belongs.

Another flutter and it came to pathetic rest to lie in grimy mud for perhaps 20 minutes. A companion Lesser Yellowlegs came over, looked at it for a moment or two and stalked away.  It looked around for a while, then stopped struggling and died.  Unable to stand it would not be able to feed the way a yellowlegs should. I suspect that it soon became soaked and cold.

Other than that it was a joy to see so many shorebirds who in a week or two will be anywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to Patagonia. Below is one of the Short-billed Dowitchers.