Scott: Some shorebirds buck usual gender roles

Even casual birdwatchers quickly learn that in most species the males tend to sport the most colorful plumages, while the females are more subtly hued. Often this relates to the females bearing the greater share of nesting duties, so understandably needing to be more camouflaged. So, it’s intriguing when the roles are reversed, as they are in a subfamily of shorebirds, the phalaropes.

Wilson’s phalaropes are by far the most common species seen locally during their spring and late summer migrations, nesting in the northern states and Canada and wintering in South America. Usually found in large ponds, lakes, or other wetlands, they’re fairly easy to see in April and May and then again from July through September. The Elephant Butte Lake shoreline, Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and the Holloman evaporation ponds are often good places to look.

Red-necked phalaropes are much rarer and seen in smaller numbers, but typically show up during the same time frames. Nesting in the Arctic and other far northern haunts, they prefer open ocean and beaches, and winter from South America to Africa to Indonesia. Red phalaropes, very rarely seen inland even in migration, also breed in the Arctic and winter across the southern hemisphere.

Both Wilson’s and red-necked phalaropes are usually easy to distinguish from other shorebirds, as they share a quirky feeding habit of spinning frenetically around on the water. The resultant churning up of the water is said to stir up the small invertebrates upon which the birds feed. Larval and other insects, aquatic worms, zooplankton, mollusks, and small fish comprise their diet.

Determining which species of phalarope you’re seeing can be trickier, and sometimes made much more so because both species have considerably plainer gray fall and winter plumages than their spiffy spring breeding get-ups. So, it’s fun when conditions align in the spring and both genders of both species – in their distinctive breeding plumages – are in view at the same time.

As mentioned earlier, the females are the ones sporting the more striking colors, and they will be the ones to hand off all the nesting duties to the more-drably colored males once eggs are laid. While the males are busy incubating eggs and rearing young, the females will depart their breeding grounds and start back on their southward migration.

In our area we may see returning female Wilson’s phalaropes as early as late June, marking the shortest turnaround time of any shorebird. Males and juveniles, on the other hand, lag by a month or two and may linger into October, allowing plenty of time to observe the birds as they travel through the borderlands.

Separating the species and genders when in their drabber winter plumage can be more challenging than in the spring, but determining that they are phalaropes of some kind is quite a bit easier. Though shorebird identification can be extremely tricky a lot of the time, these whirling dervishes on the water are a refreshing exception!

Marcy Scott is a local birder, botanizer, and author of "Hummingbird Plants of the Southwest." Along with her husband, Jimmy Zabriskie, she operates Robledo Vista Nursery in the North Valley, www.robledovista.com, specializing in native and adapted plants for birds and wildlife habitat. She can be reached at HummingbirdPlantsSW@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Scott: Some shorebirds buck usual gender roles