A Wider View

After a snowbound week in early December, I finally got out to Banner on a crisp cold (below zero) day, glittering with hoar frost. The marsh was utterly quiet, empty except for a few red-tails roosting with fluffed out feathers. I reveled in snow pictures for an hour, and then went home to thaw out. Coffee in hand, I warmed up by the fire and dug out some summer/fall pictures and my new used copy of the Audubon Society Encyclopedia of Birds of North America. If you’re stuck inside on a cold day, you might as well enjoy some bird pictures.



One wading bird I had shots of in September, a Lesser Yellow-legs, intrigued me. I only had seen him in fall and in spring, so clearly he was a migrant. It was time to put a little information about him with his picture. On page 807 of the Encyclopedia I found this:

“Yellowlegs, lesser, Tringa flavipes,….In summer, Alaska and across Canada; one of the tattlers.. very noisy on nesting grounds at the approach of an intruder; ..in migration seen about coastal ponds and pools in salt marshes, inland on mudflats and on wet short-grass marshes with ponds…..in spring migrating north from Patagonia, arrives in Fla. in late Mar.; moves up both coasts in Apr-May but in far greater numbers up the western side of the Mississippi Valley;…arrives in nesting grounds in Canada in Apr-May.”

Patagonia to Canada! Wow! A journey of about 8000 miles twice a year! If they take from late March to May to get from Florida to Canada, they travel a little more than 2000 miles a month. Amazing! No wonder they don’t seem to hang around the marsh very long; they are on the move.

This would have rendered me speechless, except I wasn’t talking. If my little guy was a tour guide, what could he tell us about? So I decided to fill in the information a bit. What refuges and parks would be on the northward route from Patagonia? What landscapes and animals might my little yellowlegs have seen?

When I looked at the map, I realized that I knew very little of the landscape south of the border: the Andes, Brazilian rain forest, drug farms in Columbia, and the storm tossed straights of Magellan below Tierra del Fuego. That’s it. My knowledge is limited and certainly inaccurate.






So today I began my journey on the Internet to catch up with my Yellowlegs. The first item was to learn the names of the countries of South America. Then I used Wikipedia to locate national parks and wildlife refuges, complete with photographs copied from Google images. I have to guess about the exact route, and I haven’t even begun to investigate the influence of the trade winds on their flight, but I think I can safely assume that many of the Yellowlegs follow the coast and others surely make use of one of the largest wetland areas in the world, the Pantanal, which spreads from Paraguay and parts of Bolivia into southern Brazil. Anyway, here is a map with a few possibilities located on it, accompanied with pictures of the landscape and some of the local animals and birds that are permanent residents.










1. Tierra del Fuego National Park, Argentina












2. Iguazú National Park
The Devil's Gorge, fed by the river Iguazú, is a stunning waterfall 70 meters in height, which serves as a barrier separating two National Parks, one of which is in Argentina and the other in Brazil. Both have been declared World Heritage sites.







3. The Panatanal, Paraguay











4. The Pantanal, Bolivia















5. Manu National Park, Peru













6. Parque Nacional Tayrona, Columbia









7. Parque Nacional Jaragua Dominican Republic















8. Everglades National Park, Florida











9. Wheeler Wildlife Refuge, Alabama

10. Mississippi River Valley flyway

11. Wapusk National Park, Manitoba














It’s amazing to think that this innocuous little 9 ½ to 11 inch bird is a world class traveler with experience in ecosystems that are inhabited by animals adapted to the artic, temperate zones or the tropics: parrots, jaguars, beluga whales, polar bears, and the huge variety of species found in the Caribbean. They survive the journey twice a year, and pass on their navigational techniques to each new generation. That’s adaptability!