Wilson's Phalarope

About the Wilson's Phalarope

Phalaropes are the shorebirds that decided to swim, and the Wilson's Phalarope brings the trick to Texas twice a year. Its signature move is unmistakable: the bird spins in tight, rapid circles on the water, whipping up a tiny vortex that pulls invertebrates within reach of its needle-thin bill.<br><br>The species also runs its social life in reverse. Females are the big, boldly colored ones - soft gray crowned with a black-and-chestnut stripe sweeping down the neck in breeding dress - and they do the courting, while the plainer males take on all incubation and chick-rearing alone on the prairie wetlands where the species breeds.<br><br>Texas catches Wilson's Phalaropes in migration, sometimes in impressive numbers, on shallow lakes, sewage ponds, playas, and flooded fields. Fall birds are pale gray and white, delicate and clean-looking among the browner sandpipers, still spinning like wind-up toys.<br><br>Their journey is a serious one, linking prairie breeding grounds to the salt lakes of the Andes in South America, with staging stops at hypersaline lakes where birds nearly double their weight on brine flies. That little spinning bird on a Texas pond is between hemispheres.