Some of the birds that depend on these marshes include: Wilson's phalarope, red-necked phalarope, American avocet, black-necked stilt, marbled godwit, snowy plover, western sandpiper, long-billed dowitcher, tundra swan, American white pelican, white-faced ibis, California gull, eared grebe, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, plus large populations of various ducks and geese.
Stevenson swung his arms in an arc and named the birds around us like a trick shooter nailing tossed cards: "Four stilts, two laughing gulls, three godwits, a flock of royal terns, clapper rails and — there he is — one piping plover".
The first of these (the suborder Charadrii), collectively known as shorebirds or waders, includes sandpipers, plovers, lapwings, snipes, stilts, and some less-familiar forms.
Oystercatchers, stilts, dowitchers, willets, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, royal terns, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated sandpipers — along the sand and in the shallows, thousands of heads were going up and down as long, thin bills plucked up what probably were horseshoe-crab eggs.
The birds exhibited are a spur-winged plover, an Egyptian plover and a white-tailed plover.
58 kg: Dennis Hall, Plover, Wisc.
Bumper stickers with two plover-bashing messages -- "Plovers Make Good Traction" and "Piping Plover Tastes Like Chicken" -- proliferate.
Most plovers feed during the day, but the crab plover feeds mostly at twilight.
To me, that was a stilt house.
