Plover decoys

Have you had a chance to spend some time watching a shorebird closeup? I did this evening, sitting in the front yard under the shower tree, while a golden plover in winter plumage spent a couple hours feeding. I played the game of Name That Decoy Maker: of which decoy maker does its pose of the moment remind me?

In Milwaukee I'd do that from time to time with the geese, mallards, and blackducks in the pond below the bluff near my old apartment. There my reaction for each specie was most always: Ward Brothers.

Here with plover I thought Elmer Crowell and Bill Bowman, and came to a new appreciation of Bill Bowman, or, as some argue convincingly, Charles Sumner Bunn. I've long thought Crowell managed to put more life into his shorebirds, but today realized how Bowman/Bunn captured the poised moment. He didn't manage the quirky movement which Crowell did in his best with his turned and tilted heads and leaps forwards, but in the pause, looking about, the moment of rest, the stretched neck, he caught the sense of life.

I also thought of my favorite maker of feeders, Obediah Verity in the negative: he created wonderful lyrical curves, which have no relation to what a plover actually does in feeding. It doesn't keep its body erect and create a curving neck to feed: it stretches its head and neck out nearly straight and tilts its whole body. Beautiful, and I'd love a shelf full of them, but no, not accurate.

Watching this one today made me wonder how many of the shorebirds we identify as runners were actually intended to be seen as feeders. Simply pushing the stake into the ground at an acute angle would turn the bill into the ground at the right angle for feeding.