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Red knots are medium-sized shorbirds with epic migrations that take many of them from their high Arctic breeding grounds to South American beaches. They pass through Southern California during a few weeks in spring and again in late summer and fall, and a few spend the winter. These birds were photographed in April at the Salton Sea in southern California, a stopover site on their northward migration where they feed heavily on brine fly larvae along with many western sandpipers, dunlins, and other migrants. Most of them have largely completed molt into breeding plumage; some are not that far along in the process. Some of the birds in this flock had leg flags indicating that they wintered in Baja California (#771 is shown immediately below); another (#66) was banded at Grays Harbor, Washington in May 2014 and subsequently was seen in Baja. Many knots winter much farther south (e.g., southern Chile). |
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