In my description of our Sunday at the coast, I realized I hadn't mentioned
one thing we observed that really wowed us.

When the Marbled Godwits that had flushed came back in to roost several
times, they roosted all over the pilings on the little dock to the east of
the marina, as is often the case. But there are so many of them and so few
pilings that they really crowd onto them. Repeatedly we saw birds landing on
the backs of other birds, trying for a roosting spot. Often the landees flew
up, leaving the roost spot to the new bird, but often they didn't, and the
incoming bird would balance on the back of another, wings waving to keep its
balance. This happened again and again, but one bird in particular was very
persistent, and it stood so long on another's back in one instance that we
were amazed. It kept trying to fold its wings, but the lower bird would
shift a bit and it would have to open them again. It almost got stabilized
several times, and we started to think that indeed it was going to roost on
the lower bird, but it finally flew. I've never seen anything like that
before, but I'll bet it happens all the time there. Why the lower godwit
doesn't reach up with that long bill and poke the other one in the belly, I
don't know. I'd have to conclude that godwits are pretty agreeable birds.

But speaking of anthropomorphic, I want to add an emendation to my previous
post. I wrote about predators "scaring up" flocks of shorebirds and said I
didn't feel so guilty about scaring them myself. "Scaring" is a charged and
almost surely inappropriate word, as we have no evidence whatsoever that
birds are scared when a predator flies by and they go into a
predator-avoidance mode. "Disturbed" would be a much more accurate word, I
think. Where there are a lot of falcons around, I assume birds have a
mechanism whereby they can suppress the secretion of great quantities of
stress hormones, or they would be nervous wrecks.

Dennis Paulson