Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Wood Sandpiper

These shots are all taken around two weeks ago at Cho Lae. There's a nice flooded field next to the small dirty road inside the area. A flock of more than 20 Wood Sandpipers was feeding sparsely all over the field. Most of the birds were juveniles and others were adults moulting out of their worn breeding plumage. I waited to see if there's any other interesting species coming or not, but only the Wood Sandpipers showed up. Although these birds are very common, they are extremely difficult to approach unlike most waders I've photographed in Japan. I had to hide myself among tall grass waited for the birds to come closer, but they still left quite a distant away from me, so all I got was this set of birdscaping shots.

Most adult birds had very worn plumage.

Phalarope!?
Or Redshank? Some juveniles have much brighter orange-yellowish legs.

2 comments:

Stuart Price said...

Some beautiful shots there, I generally only see the odd individual in Hokkaido.........

Phil Slade said...

Some briliant shots considering how distant and wild Wood Sands are, just as they are here, the only difference being we get one or two at a time not twenty!