A week ago I was with a group of students at Moss Landing, where we spent a couple of hours watching birds on our way down to Fort Ord Natural Reserve for an overnight camping trip. The visit was well-timed: we arrived at low tide so there was a lot of mud flat exposed, meaning ample real estate for foraging shorebirds. By now the students were pretty comfortable using binoculars, and it warmed my heart to see them getting used to one of my favorite tools in the naturalist’s kit.
2023-02-11
© Allison J. Gong
The real stars of this particular tale were the birds. Specifically, a pair of willets (Tringa semipalmata). As we walked along the road towards the dunes and beach, I caught sight of a pair of willets involved in what appeared to be an altercation of sorts. I snapped off a bunch of photos and continued on.
When I had time to review the photos a few days later, I saw that what I had thought was some display of aggression was actual mating, or preliminary activities to actual mating. Oops! That hadn’t occurred to me at the time because somewhere in the back of my brain I thought that willets are winter visitors here who breed elsewhere. Of course, courtship and pair-bonding involve multiple bouts of copulation, and any single copulation event may or may not result in successful insemination. It does make sense for copulation to occur before migration to breeding grounds, whether the “real thing” happens here or in the birds’ summer range.
All this to say that I captured a series of photographs that, if they were of our species, would be considered pornographic. But since the subjects were willets and not humans, I can call them wildlife photography!
This is a series of 21 photos, presented as a slide show. The entire sequence of events took about 10 seconds.
I didn’t catch the exact moment of cloacal contact, if indeed there was any. It does still feel a little bit voyeuristic, but that’s why I like watching birds in the first place—they carry on their lives and don’t care about human morals or pruderies. It is always an honor and a privilege to witness nature doing its thing. And who knows, perhaps a new generation of willets was conceived by this pair!