Creatures of the Tides

The wading birds that we find on beaches, estuaries, and mud flats on the coast in summer seem like marching armies because they walk so distinctly stiff and band together in such disciplined ranks. Like all armies, they fly, rest, and feed together for survival rather than glory. Their survival is precarious, since they are dependent on the food available between the high and low tides. They are creatures of the tide.

Tides are actions of the ocean, so it would seem that one must seek the waders there. However, these birds must pass over the land between the tundra and the coast, and sometimes they are stopped by weather on the way. When the rains broke our local drought on Saturday, August 14, they also brought some sandpipers to our "shores."

The Connecticut River is our local shore, and though we are far beyond the reach of ocean tides, the level of the river varies often enough to create mini mud flats at various places along its banks. A large shallow area next to an island on the river three miles south of Springfield is often exposed by low water, and waders find a place to rest and feed when interrupted on their journey to the coast.

A friend called that Saturday morning to tell of many waders on this "sandbar," including one that was rare for this area, a red knot. Although several of us rushed there to find the bird, it had already moved on. However, the visit was not in vain. Over a dozen of the beach-loving sanderlings were still present, mixed in with a flock of over 200 semipalmated and least sandpipers.

You can almost always find a few least sandpipers on this sandbar starting in mid-July. They are the smallest of the 'peeps,' or sparrow sized waders, and they prefer the driest parts of the mud flat to feed. This allows them to stop more often on the overland flight, since the drier flats are fairly common inland.

Also present then and regularly are a few of the slightly larger spotted and solitary sandpipers. They are not part of any vast army, because they nest nearby, and travel alone or in very small groups. Finally there were two plovers, one that breeds in pastures and bare wasteland around here, and one that is part of the tundra contingent. These are the killdeer and the semipalmated plover. The plovers are excellent practitioners of the military step. Like robins, they stop and check the ground around them, then scurry double time for a few feet and stop again.

The one species "not" there was the red knot. Birds are like the tides that the waders depend on, you must catch them before they turn. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar noted that "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." The tide turned even on a great general of armies like Caesar, and he missed his fortune, as we missed the bird.

The only red knots ever found before in our region were also on this sandbar, single birds in August of 1982 and again in 1985. Such scarcity proves how tenacious this species is in returning to only a few places every summer along the east coast, all at shoreline estuaries. On our bird club trip to South Beach in Chatham we saw several hundred of these rotund waders with reddish chests, a vestige of their rich rusty breeding plumage. Most of them are on their way to Argentina for our winter, although a few remain along our continental coast from Virginia to Texas.

Some say the knot got its name from another leader of armies, King Canute (Knut) of Denmark. King Canute was said to have become disgusted with the way his courtiers fawned upon him, making him a royal god. So he walked out upon the ocean sands at low tide, and then commanded the waters to stay, like Moses in the Red Sea. He got wet of course and proved his point.

The word "tide" comes from an old English word for "divide," and it originally also meant "time." To divide earth from sea and night from day is to be the author of creation and time itself. The time or the tide waits for no creature. Neither do the waders wait for us.