When I tracked down the Pectoral Sandpipers a week ago on a puddle of still water the size of a hockey rink, I did not realize they were the opening act of a show of shore birds and waders that should last a week.

Every day new actors would show up, others moved on. 

Of special interest to me was the Red-necked Phalarope. It is a bird that spends 10 months of the year on the open southern ocean in company of Albatross and Shearwater.

The brighter colored bird (below) is the female.

She mates with a male at the shores of the Arctic ocean, lays the eggs and flies off to find another male to do the same thing. The male will sit on the eggs and rears the hatchlings. Since the adults never see any humans on the ocean or in the far North, they can be approached rather closely.