New Bird Sighting

A couple of years ago my neighbor excavated another small pond in a low area of the backyard.

He is actually the local grave digger.

He is an excavator extraordinaire.

Our intent was to capture the rainwater from about half of the gutters and all of the sump pump discharge.

We wanted something bigger than an ordinary rain garden - something on the order of a micro-wetland.

I constructed a berm around the pond from the excavated spoils and over-seeded it with rye to keep any erosion down.

It immediately became the dog's private swimming hole.

We cannot keep Girlfriend out of it.

In the summer the dog is content to spend an entire day chasing about the pond catching frogs.

Somewhere at the bottom of the pond are a couple of perfectly good Frisbees and countless tennis balls.

Anyway, last fall I finally got around to nuking all of the vegetation and seeded the berm (and a good portion of he surrounding dead turf) with a variety of wet-loving native grasses and forbs. We stapled erosion matting over the berm and let the whole shebang set over winter so the freeze-thaw cycle would stratify the seed and allow it form good ground contact.

This afternoon I noticed a bird picking about my expensively-seeded berm and just generally hanging around.

It is still there as I write this post.

Olive-colored back, white breast, white ring around the eyes and a long dark bill.

I surmised that it is a Spotted Sandpiper (although it has no spots to speak-of yet so it's probably not quite yet at the breeding stage).

Get this. The females mate with multiple males and lay eggs in multiple nests. The males then incubate the eggs and care for the young.

This doesn't sound at all fair.

Then again - nature isn't fair all of the time.














I have no recollection of seeing one of these before so it's been added to the life list.

I wonder if it's passing through or sticking around?