Travel Reference
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The sandpipers follow the Pacific coast from Panama to Alaska, but they breed inland.
The female drops the egg and heads south again. The male stays until the egg hatches and
then follows the female. “The hatchlings are precocious and self-sufficient almost imme-
diately,” says Kelly.
Mariana Van Blair is here from Port Townsend in Washington state. “I'm not a birder
but I love photography,” she says and positions her camera on a tripod for a close-up of a
dunlin, his black belly making him stand out dramatically in a group of sandpipers.
“Look, there's a shoveler,” says Joann Callaghan, here from Delaware to visit her sister
who is a Catholic nun in St. Mary's, but you get the feeling that family comes a distant
second compared to the birds.
And then with a whoosh of air a peregrine falcon comes screaming down out of our six
like an F-15 on a strafing run. The sandpipers splinter into a skittering, screeching mass. I
don't blame the falcon, it probably looks like a raptor smorgasbord down there on the
flats. I follow him to the tree line through the binoculars when I am distracted by a bright
yellow open cockpit biplane doing loops and snap rolls and barrel rolls far overhead. I ad-
mit, it was pretty impressive, but the biplane is a poor second best in dash and style to the
falcon.
I think part of the human fascination with birds is envy. They can fly and we can't.
It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't look like they were having so much fun.
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