[va-bird] Possible Little Curlew at CBBT


The subtitle of this posting might be: Or, Have I Completely Lost My Mind?

The thing that none of us wants to happen while birding happened to me today 
at 11:30 on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, northernmost island.  It was a 
grand migration day, one of the best of the fall season, with moderate north 
winds ushering thousands of birds to the southern tip of the Delmarva.  After 
enjoying the normal gatherings of Common Yellowthroats, Palm Warblers, 
Savannah Sparrows, Marsh Wrens, and Brown Thrashers, along with a nice ad. 
light-morph Parasitic Jaeger chasing Laughing Gulls in the Chesapeake 
Channel, I started back toward the truck on the eastern side of the 
northernmost island (#4).  Pausing to scan to the north, a medium-sized 
shorebird flew in from the east, off the Bay, perhaps 30 feet off the tarmac, 
only a tenth of a mile to my north.  The light was good.  I raised my glass.  

What I saw caused momentary cognitive dissonance.  For a split second, 
certainly less than a second, I assumed the bird to be an Upland Sandpiper, 
for which there are a few CBBT records, all in autumn.  But the bird's bill 
was decurved, strongly so at the tip; the bill  appeared to be four inches 
long, roughly, and was pale/pinkish in the base of the mandible, dark 
otherwise.  In short, the bill was too long and too decurved for an Upland 
Sandpiper.  The face, pale and plain like an Uppie's (pale lores, dark 
postocular line), was defined by a dark crown stripe, rather like a 
Whimbrel's, but set higher in the face/head.  At this point, I knew the bird 
was something I'd never seen before, not an Upland, not a Whimbrel, but 
surely, clearly one of the tiny curlews, an Eskimo or a Little.  And not 
another birder in sight.  

I had the presence of mind as I watched the bird to concentrate on the 
underwing, which was a flat straw brown or even yellowish/sandy brown, 
patterned with darker barring, but showing nothing of the cinnamon coloration 
attributed to Eskimo Curlew (which, I think, would show a bill a bit longer 
than this bird's; but a juvenile might appear shorter of bill).  (At the very 
least, this mark of Eskimo Curlew has been drilled into us over and over by 
mentors and field guides.)  The upperwing surface appeared darker in the 
primaries, particularly the outer primaries, than in the rest of the wing, 
but the outermost primary showed a white shaft; this doesn't accord with 
several paintings of Little Curlew's upperwing I looked over briefly in a 
friend's SHOREBIRDS book, which make the upperparts appear mostly uniformly 
dark, but I have yet to make a search of the literature on this bird, and I 
don't recall what the upperwing should look like versus other species.

The bird looked around as it flew in, and it turned gradually toward the 
north-northwest.  I lost it as it flew below bridge-level but apparently 
continuing north toward Wise Point.  I drove around to the other side, 
scanning the rocks with no luck.  Immediately, I drove to Kiptopeke (it was 
then about 11:55), entrained Bob Anderson, and ran home to get a camera and sc
ope.  We rendezvoused at Latimer's Bluff, the first farm fields the bird 
might have seen (I recalled its preference for field habitats from accounts 
of vagrants in California), and we looked over various fields in the southern 
tip area: Semipalmated Plover and Killdeer were all we could turn up.  We had 
hoped to repeat our luck with American Golden-Plovers and Buff-breasted 
Sandpipers of two weeks ago.  Finding (as has been true for over a week now), 
no areas of grasspiper concentration in the very dry fields, we wondered 
whether the bird might have put down at Fisherman Island, the first land it 
would have seen coming north.

We stopped by the refuge, where the manager, Sue Rice, was out at a meeting, 
so we knew the only way to study the flats and beaches at Fisherman was by 
kayak.  We ran across the road to SouthEast Expeditions, rented two Captivas, 
and put in at Sunset Beach, in three foot seas.  Northwest winds carried us 
to Fisherman in about 20 minutes, which we circumnavigated in about five 
hours.  We did not see the bird, though we did see countless American 
Kestrels crossing the Bay toward Virginia Beach, along with smaller numbers 
of Merlin, Cooper's and Sharp-shinned Hawks, Northern Harriers, Peregrines, 
and a Bald Eagle.  It was a great day for terns -- all those Sandwich Terns 
that we usually see from the CBBT (missing this year) were on pound net 
stakes off Sunset Beach and Wise Point (40 here) and roosting on Fisherman 
(about 90), with over 220 Caspian Terns, 400 Royals, 150 or so Forster's, and 
thousands of gulls and Brown Pelicans.  Shorebirds were limited in number.  

I will be checking local farm fields in days to come, needless to say.  I 
encourage anyone birding on the Shore to do the same.  

I post this narrative in the most tentative manner -- I have never come 
across a bird this rare in my birding travels, and I would not regard a 
single-observer sight report, particularly of a flyby, with anything other 
than polite skepticism.  I can't treat my own experience any differently, 
though I do feel strongly that this bird was neither an Upland Sandpiper nor 
a Whimbrel.  It looked roughly intermediate between these species.   

But I wanted to pass this word on, so that people who do much of their 
shorebirding in farm fields, sod farms, and sewage treatment plants in the 
East will be keen to concentrate on their patches for a possible waif from 
northeastern Siberia.  I know of only a handful of western records (CA, AK, 
WA), none from eastern North America.  I have half-joked, for decades, about 
this species turning up on the flats at Chincoteague.  

In exhaustion and disappointment,
Ned Brinkley
Cape Charles, Virginia
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