Ah, those little surfbirds, how they they love a low tide. Low water exposes their winter feeding grounds.
This flock seemed oblivious to anything but feeding. The rocks had a fresh growth of algae and apparently hosted lots of prey. Wintering on rocky surf-swept shores, the surfbirds’s dark plumage blends in nicely. Is it camouflage? A lot of people think so. And it makes sense, the peregrines that patrol the winter range make a living with their vision.
Surfbirds summer and nest in the Alaskan interior but the winter range is strictly surf zone.
This is an attractive reach of shore and it’s here, right behind me where I approached the feeding flock, that Fall Creek hits the beach in a gem of a little coastal waterfall.
On the wintering grounds surfbirds and their common name are a good match. Described from a specimen collected in the Gulf of Alaska in 1778, the scientific description of the summer habitat, nests, and eggs in interior didn’t occur until much later.
References
Senner, Stanley E. and Brian J. Mccaffery. 1997. Surfbird (Calidris virgata), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/266
doi:10.2173/bna.266
