Solitary sandpiper in the Northwoods

I love the diversity found in nature. I also love the rule breakers in the natural world – the critters that don’t follow the rules we think nature should follow. Last week, while leading a photo workshop to photograph black bears in northern Minnesota, I was reminded once again of nature’s incredible diversity.

My small group of photographers was following a female black bear with two yearling cubs. The bears were walking through a wetland area with a few fallen trees and a couple of high spots that were dry and covered with green grasses. As we moved closer, I saw a fairly large bird fly out of one of the high spots and land about five yards away, right out in the open.

Here in the Northwoods, there are only a handful of bird species it could be, this deep into the woods. The habitat is a mix of conifer and deciduous trees with a small stream and associated wetlands. The long winters and short, but hot and buggy, summers really define this habitat.

Looking over to the last spot I saw the bird land, I could clearly see it was a shorebird. Its long legs and long beak, offset by a large, full body, told me it was definitely a solitary sandpiper (Tringa solitaria). Yep, you read that correctly, a sandpiper deep in the Northwoods. How crazy is that?

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When you think of sandpipers, you automatically think of the ocean or some sandy beach shore, or perhaps a freshwater lake or something along those lines. You definitely don’t think of deep northern conifer woods filled with black bears and bobcats.

As its name implies, the solitary sandpiper is usually seen alone, even during migration, although sometimes it can be seen in small congregations of fewer than 10. It is definitely a freshwater bird that even uses freshwater during winter. It winters in Central and South America, especially in the Amazon River basin, where fresh water is abundant. Because of this, there haven’t been many studies done on this species. There is much that isn’t known about this bird.

These Northwoods sandpipers have an interesting habit of bobbing their tails and the back half of their bodies while feeding. They hang out in wooded swamps, along small woodland streams, ditches, or flooded fields.

Nesting is where the solitary sandpiper really stands out among other sandpipers. There are about 85 different kinds of sandpipers, but it’s the solitary that doesn’t nest on the ground like the others. Instead, the male finds the old nests of other birds, such as American robins, rusty blackbirds, and Canada jays. The female will make the final selection, then remove some of the interior lining of the old nest and replace it with fresh plant materials before laying her eggs.

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The old nests are usually located near the trunk of the tree and only 6 to 8 feet off the ground. So not only is this sandpiper found in the Northwoods and not at the shore, but it also nests up in trees, using old nests of other bird species, and not on the ground like other shorebirds. How much crazier can this bird get?

So now you know why I was so distracted from the black bears when this bird popped up in front of us. Of course, the others in my group didn’t care about this strange bird in the Northwoods, but only because they didn’t understand how different and cool this shorebird is compared to other shorebirds.

Ornithologists first described the solitary sandpiper in the early 1800s, but their nesting activity was not discovered until the early 1900s. It took nearly 100 years to uncover this unique bird’s unusual nesting behavior.

Over 90 percent of the global population of the solitary sandpiper breeds in the boreal forest or Northwoods of North America. Most of this population is in Alaska, Canada, and Labrador, which is a part of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador in eastern Canada. In the lower 48 states, it only nests in northern Minnesota.

I think you can see why I was so happy to get a chance to see and capture some images of this unusual sandpiper. Until next time …

Editor’s note: Stan Tekiela’s NatureSmart column appears twice a month in the Eden Prairie Local News. Tekiela is an author, naturalist, and wildlife photographer who travels extensively across the United States to study and capture wildlife images.

You can follow his work on Instagram and Facebook. He can be contacted via his website at www.naturesmart.com.