Audubon México San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato

Bird Sightings

THE AMERICAN AVOCET by Walter L. Meagher Is the beauty of the bird - strongly contrasting black and white colors, a splash of orange on the chest and, like a catwalk model, long legs - compromised by its upturned bill? It is a ‘nose’ schoolboys would mock. Standing alert on coastal and inland mudflats, sometimes in groups of 30,000 (as reported at Great Salt Lake), the American Avocet is a quintessential wader, showing us how aquatic invertebrates may be caught.

photograph by Wayne Colony

We watch them on the presa. The bill is swished back and forth, the heads moving metronomically, disturbing the concealment of water bugs and tiny shrimps on the presa bottom. When the water is deeper, they immerse their whole heads, as Audubon observed. This is what avocets do, it is their way of feeding. But consider this: from time to time you may see 7-12 avocets upended, like dabbler ducks, rotating the perfect circle of their bodies in unison as if they were one organism. They are doing together what each bird can do alone. Cooperation produces a new methodology, as it does for Polynesian Islanders, who catch fish by encircling them in the sea.