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Red knot        Images © Mark A. Chappell

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.
            Other pictures of (mostly) breeding-plumage red knots are on this page and here; pictures of red knots in flight are here.

  • Canon 7D2, 800 mm IS lens + 1.4X converter, fill-in flash (2016)