Dude Looks Like a Lady

Is this a he or a she?

For many bird species, females get the short end of the stick when it comes to bright plumage, singing ability, and, in some cases, offspring rearing duties. Think for a moment about the life of a male ruby-throated hummingbird: He sets up a territory, courts a female (or several), fertilizes as many eggs as he can, then his job is done. He goes and hangs around the feeder, spending the day drinking and fighting, like an unemployed bully. The female whose eggs he fertilized? He can't even remember what she looked like.

No so with the phalaropes. Or, exactly so with phalaropes, but with the sexes reversed.

Consider, if you will, the Wilson's phalarope.

We get to see Wilson's phalaropes each June when we're in North Dakota. This year's wet spring in the Dakotas seemed to provide more nesting and foraging habitat for the phals, so they were almost everywhere. While out doing some casual bird watching with my OWN offspring, Phoebe and Liam, we happened upon the pair of Wilson's phalaropes depicted in my photos, in a flooded cornfield.

After both kids got a good look at the pair, I asked them which one they thought was the male. Both kids chose the more brightly colored of the two, until Phoebe deduced that this was probably a trick question.

Female Wilson's phalarope.

In phalaropes, the sexual dimorphism is flipped from what we see in most other birds. It is the female that is both larger and more colorful in appearance. Males are duller colored to blend in better when incubating eggs on the nest. But as that annoying huckster Billy Mays often says "But wait! There's MORE!"

Females (sometimes several at once) court a male for the right to mate. After Ms. W. Phal is chosen by a Mr. W. Phal, he fertilizes her eggs (she still gets THAT duty) and she lays them in a nest scrape. Then her work is mostly done. She skips away as free as a male hummingbird, to do whatever she wishes: forage, loaf, find other males to court and spark with...

Female (left) and male(right) Wilson's phalaropes.

Meanwhile, back at the nest, Mr. Phal get to incubate the eggs and, once the precocial chicks emerge, he and some of his fellow single dads get the kids together to learn the intricacies of life as a phalarope.

Now I am sure that some of my fellow humans out there think this just ain't right. That this particular gender roll reversal is not only evil, it threatens the very fabric of our society, if not our freedom. I just think it's one of the million of cool things that we as bird watchers are privileged to know, once we take the time to learn them.

This photo shows the size difference between the sexes. She is bigger than he.

By the way, when you were a beginning birder, did you know how to pronounce PHAL-a-rope? I've heard all kinds of versions: fall-AIR-oh-pee, fal-ar-ROPE-ee, PHIL-an-thrope, Sha-SHEV-skee.

For an excellent (but not overly scientific) explanation of the breeding cycle and natural history of the Wilson's phalarope, read Dave Iron's post about this subject on BirdFellow.com.

Swarms of Phalaropes

Half of our ABA group on the causeway leading to Antelope Island State Park, Utah.

Back in late June, during the American Birding Association annual convention in Utah, I was assigned to help lead a field trip to Antelope Island State Park. Antelope Island is located on the southeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake, north of Salt Lake City.

We left the Snowbird Lodge high in the Wasatch Mountains before dawn, dropping down to the desert along this large briny inland sea. Our trip consisted of two huge touring coaches, each one loaded with excited bird-heads.

Our first stop was along the causeway leading to the park entrance. So this is the Great Salt Lake. The smell of fermenting brine shrimp came onto the coach to meet us. Rugged plum-colored mountains surrounded the lake at a distance. Shallow brackish water bracketed the road. The water was so shallow that huge areas of salty sandflats appeared here and there, and the movement of birds and insects was obvious everywhere we looked. Stepping off of the bus I noticed several flocks of swift shorebirds flying overhead. They were buoyant fliers, snipelike in shape, but stiltlike in their gracefulness.

I was momentarily puzzled.

Then it hit me—just as someone else shouted "Wilson's phalaropes going overhead!"

Of course!

Wilson's phalaropes overhead, flying to join the huge feeding flocks on the Great Salt Lake.

Flock after flock, each one with between 12 and 30 birds, flew overhead, all headed in the same direction.

"Look at ALL those phalaropes!" I heard myself exclaim. I'd never seen so many at once.

"If you think that's a lot. Look out there, over the water!" said a birder next to me.

There, swirling over the water about 300 yards out were CLOUDS of phalaropes. They looked more like swarms of insects than flocks of birds. And they were reportedly ALL Wilson's phalaropes, staging, molting, and gorging before heading south for the winter.
Every June, as soon as they have finished nesting up north, the phalaropes begin gathering at the Great Salt Lake. As many as half a million may use the lake as a resting and feeding stop on their southward migration.

These birds, in a few weeks, would make a non-stop flight to northern South America. There they'll spend the winter on inland lakes high in the Argentinian Andes—a journey of more than 5,000 miles.

Red-necked phalaropes also pass through the Great Salt Lake, but not in such staggering numbers.

The appearance of these post-breeding phalaropes coincides with the large hatches of brine flies, small harmless insects that form their own dark clouds. The phalaropes and other birds gorge on the abundant brine flies, as well as the equally abundant brine shrimp, putting on body fat that will fuel their long migration.

Here it was, just the last week of June and already fall migration was on for these phalaropes.

I'll share a few images of the distant clouds of Wilson's phalaropes from our morning at Antelope Island State Park.

Like a wave above the water's surface, thousands of phalaropes shifted to new feeding spots.

The flocks were constantly ebbing and flowing.

This was just one small portion of the flock. It extended twice this far to each side of my camera's frame.

This must have been what flocks of passenger pigeons looked like 200 years ago.