August-September 2026 • Nebraskaland 23
A spotted sandpiper walks near the shore at Lake Minatare.
While the origin of the bird's name is obvious in spring, it loses
its spots outside of breeding.
A least sandpiper moves through exposed vegetation at
Walgren Lake. It's the smallest species of shorebird in the
world weighing 1 ounce and measuring 5-6 inches long.
W
hen thinking of a certain group of birds, a sporting event from a couple
years back comes to mind.
On a hot day in August my daughter and her teammates are opening their
high school volleyball season in Scottsbluff. As soon as the match is over, I shift
gears from the team's sports shutterbug to wildlife photographer, setting up
camp at nearby Lake Minatare and trudging through mud in the dark to place a
blind along the water's edge.
Some don't think of August as prime time for bird photography, but it can be.
Even though the bulk of fall bird migration comes a little later, there's one group
that's on the move in late summer.
Shorebirds are long-distance migrants and early movers through Nebraska for
fall migration. They are attracted to the shallows and are ideal for photographing
from the water's edge from a ground-level blind. Setting up along a shoreline to
see what birds come near is my favorite thing to do in both fall and spring.
As the group of species in the order Charadriiformes, shorebirds include
sandpipers, plovers, avocets, oystercatchers and phalaropes.
A number of these globetrotters summer in the Arctic tundra and travel to
southern South America for winter. With an aerodynamic anatomy, they don't
take much time to get from one place to the other.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology reports that about 20 species of shorebirds
have been recorded making nonstop flights of more than 3,100 miles. That's just
a tad farther than a flight from Lincoln to, say, Greenland's capitol city, Nuuk.
Yes, nonstop.
The endurance champion is the bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) which
flies nonstop in excess of 6,000 miles from western Alaska to either New
Zealand or Australia. To have enough energy to make the trip, it nearly doubles
its body weight with fat reserves before leaving.
