Plovers at MECOX

Since I would rather not be trite and repeat everything Noah said about about field trip today, I will share something else that I found particularly interesting from today.

We saw three different plover's today: the black bellied, the american Golden Plover and the Semipalmated Plover. At First it seemed an impenetrable precess to differentiate the more common black bellied plovers from its less common cousin, the golden plover. However as I become more familiar using the bird watching equipment and field guild, I came to a understanding.

Both Mature Black bellied and Golden plover's have black bellies, which tends to make identifying them as a novice ornithologist quite difficult.

Some Tips that helped me:

American Golden-plovers tend to be the smaller species of plovers. They lack white rumps and while in flight you can see their black armpits. Juvenile golden-plovers have a distinct dark cap and debatably more golden. In Bleeding plumage their black belly extends farther to the tail.