The Beach that Birthed the Plover

By Taylor Bushell

Lets play a game.  I write a place and you quickly think of an image, smell or feeling that you attribute to my word.  Ready, here it goes:  Paris… cornfield…  New York City.  Did your mind recreate the Eiffel Tower when you read ‘Paris’?  How about cigarette smoke, museums, artisan bread?  Did ‘corn field’ remind you of the sun-soaked rolling plains of North America, tractors or the smell of manure?  As birders, we can play this game with wild places (forests, grasslands, etc.) to analyze bird habitats and learn about the birds themselves.  For instance, imagine being in a thicket of young trees.  What grows there and how does it make you feel?  It is cramped, visibility is low, predators could be just out of site, navigation is difficult, and there is abundant cover.  The mature forest across the street looks and feels entirely differently; it is spacious, one can navigate more easily, predators might be high in the trees, sounds travel further and less light reaches the ground.  These physical conditions—the habitats themselves—are the driving forces of avian evolution. 

Ok, lets play the game again.  The South Carolina coast.  Here’s what comes to my mind:  Sand. Lots of sand.  Where there isn’t sand, there is water or mud.  Wind.  Hurricanes.  Waves.  Salt water.  Salty air.  Tides.  Flat land.  Wide open skies.  Humidity.  Snakes.  Mollusks.  Marshes.  College Football.  Over evolutionary time a diverse group of birds, the shorebirds, were shaped by these environmental factors in places like coastal Carolina.  The shorebirds’ anatomy reflects the anatomy of the beaches, marshes and mudflats.  They have long beaks for probing into the sand, long narrow wings for riding the endless winds, legs for water walking, beach-colored plumage, and a digestion apparatus that can cope with an abundance of salt. 

If we play the game yet again—this time focusing more specifically on one small place—we will see, in even more detail, how the shorebird body reflects the physical environment.  Sandy beach.  Here’s what comes to my mind:  Relatively flat, gently sloping, dry sand, moist sand, wet sand, shallow water, deeper water, small waves, big waves, zillions of wind-borne patterns in the sand, noisy, salty, windy, very spacious.  The beach is comprised of hundreds of micro-environments, potential shorebird feeding and resting sites.  Each plover and sandpiper species reflects a unique suite of micro-enviroments that, through millennia, are responsible for the body and life history of these birds. 

The relationship between micro-environment and shorebirds has been painted by ornithologist David Sibley to aid in their identification.  For example, the small sandpipers segregate themselves along the beach according to the depth of the water in which they feed.  Not surprisingly, the depth of the water correlates directly to the sandpipers’ leg and beak length and overall body size.

Just as David Sibley has done, amateur birders should practice verbally articulating the physical features of wild places.  By playing this little game we can analyze a bird’s habitat to learn more about why they look and act as they do. 


Taylor Bushell is a Naturalist from Eastern North America who studies the integrated components of places.  He travels widely to explore the continent’s diverse landforms, natural communities and human cultures.  He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it