Of all the birds that fly and forage and creep and pounce and stoop from great height for a living, and those that peck and stab and crack and sip, of all of these birds, Phalaropes are just plain different. They don’t fit our fond stereotypes of what birds are. How they feed, or mate, or raise their young.
Phalaropes defy categorization, and give rise to contradictory phrases such as pelagic shorebirds. Shorebirds of the open ocean. Now does that sound plausible?
Phalaropes practice a rare form of breeding known as sequential polyandry. Male Phalaropes are small gray-on-white birds. It is the female Phalaropes that are big and strong and brightly colored with rich red and russet markings.
On the breeding grounds, females fight each other while the males are busy building nests. The females choose mates, lay clutches of eggs, and as soon as those eggs hatch, they leave the family with father and move on to the next male to start the process again.
The word Phalarope is Greek for coot-footed, and theses birds do have partially webbed or flanged feet.
There are only three species of Phalaropes in the entire world. Two of these, the Red Phalarope and the Red-necked Phalarope truly fit the description of pelagic shorebirds. These birds are certainly recognizable as shorebirds, perhaps medium-sized sandpipers with short bills.
They are birds of brief Arctic summers that spend long winters floating on the great world ocean. For as much as 11 months out of 12, they bob on water far from land.
I’ve often encountered these birds on whale-watching trips looking fragile and clumsy in choppy seas like small scraps of flotsam awash in the realm of giants. This association with whales is so strong that many maritime communities call the Red Phalarope the Whale Bird.
There are a scant few records of both of these pelagic species on the Mississippi Coast, and there are persistent rumors of vast rafts of these Phalaropes floating out in the Gulf.
The third species is the Wilson’s Phalarope, named for the great ornithologist, Alexander Wilson. And this is the species that we can expect to find migrating through South Mississippi, starting right about now in early August.
Wilson’s are the largest of the Phalaropes, weighing in at a whopping two ounces. If the pelagic Phalaropes are birds apart, the Wilson’s is yet a differ critter. It is a graceful bird that carries a very long bill that narrows into a sharp point.
The Wilson’s only nest in the wetlands of the North American plains. They seem to prefer grassy edges of lakes for nesting. And during migration they flock to rich salt lakes like California’s Mono Lake where as many as 125,000 Wilson’s stuff themselves on the bounty of alkali flies and brine shrimp in the company of smaller numbers of pelagic Phalaropes.
But the Wilson’s do not follow their pelagic cousins out to sea for the winter. Instead they fly as far south as Argentina searching for more briny bodies of water.
But the one thing that sets all Phalaropes apart from other birds is the fact that they spin. They are the whirling dervishes of the avian world, spinning like waterborne tops to make their meat. And I’m not talking about just turning around while they feed. A female Wilson’s Phalarope spins at sixty revolutions per minute, and with every turn she stabs at the water, picking tiny tidbits churned up by her coot feet.
It’s a show well worth the price of admission, which is often a hot August hike into a still lake or sewage lagoon. But to see a western brine lake full of spinning Phalaropes can leave a birder in jaw-dropping wonder. A dangerous situation in a swam of alkali flies!
Phalaropes..
(that's a new one to me)
