Pectoral Sandpiper at Pugneys Country Park

Got an email last night to say a pectoral sandpiper was at the local country park lake and then today, a phone call from Mike to say it was still there. So, late this afternoon, I gave up on the wedding edits and headed down to Pugneys Country Park in Wakefield to see if I could get some record shots of this American vagrant. Strangely enough, this is the second specimen of this bird I’ve seen in Wakefield having seen the one at Anglers CP way back in the 80s. Pectoral sandpipers, or ‘Pecs’ as we birders call them, are breeding birds in North America and it is likely that this bird got blown across here in the tail-end gales of the hurricane that hit the US a couple of weeks back and will have been in the UK for a while now going about its business unseen until a keen eyed birder spotted it on the lake shore. The bird gets its name from the strongly marked breast where the speckling ends abruptly across its pectoral region. I used a low view point and a 500mm lens to get some nice frame fillers by simply lying on the ground and letting the bird approach me. Pecs are notoriously tame and show no fear of humans, though it did seem very wary of the local Canada geese! I’ve added a short video clip at the end of the post to give a flavour of the bird in action.