A rare, golden-toned sharp-tailed sandpiper walking in the mud at Elsie Roemer as the author first saw a bird she didn’t recognize.
© Bruce MastA rare, golden-toned sharp-tailed sandpiper walking in the mud at Elsie Roemer as the author first saw a bird she didn’t recognize.
A few days after I moved to Alameda, I set out on an exploratory walk of nearby Crown Beach. As I continued south on Shoreline Drive, past the bowling alley and apartments buildings and onto the sliver of a trail between a row of houses and the San Francisco Bay, my jaw actually dropped at the sight of hundreds of shorebirds—marbled godwits and western sandpipers, avocets and black-necked stilts, willets and black-bellied plovers—who were dabbling in the mudflats between the beach and Bay Farm Island bridge. A lifelong bird lover, I felt as if I had discovered gold.

What I'd discovered was the Elsie Roemer Bird Sanctuary, which to the many migratory shorebirds who flock here each winter, and the bird-loving humans who watch them, is as good as gold. I loved the place so much that my husband and I got married on its south platform in 2012! Flash forward to this fall, when I happened upon something else special there, a rare and golden-toned sharp-tailed sandpiper (Calidris acuminata).

A range map in Birds of the World shows the sharp-tailed sandpiper’s breeding range in yellow and wintering range in blue.
A range map in Birds of the World shows the sharp-tailed sandpiper’s breeding range in yellow and wintering range in blue. Juvenile birds fly to western Alaska to feed for a few weeks before they fly southeast to Australia for the winter, and occasionally one is seen on the coast of California, Oregon, or Washington. Map by Birds of the World, Cornell Laboratory.
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