American Pipet at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge

I enjoy watching birds, but I have a long ways to go before I'm very good at identifying them. There are a great many small birds that can escape our notice and look vaguely alike (I've had many students say the same things about minerals, another bit of nature that people love but have trouble identifying). The American Pipet (Anthus rubescens) is one of those birds that I often miss while watching for larger, more familiar birds. From a distance, I mistake them for sparrows.

But not up close. The bill is an immediate identifier. It is thin, where the sparrow bill is stouter. So, slowly I learn. These pipets were running around next to the auto-tour route at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge in the foreground while I was watching for Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes off in the distance. They were right there, no more than 10-15 feet away, so I snapped a few pictures.

American Pipets are just that: American. They breed in the Arctic regions of Alaska and Canada, and migrate in the winter season to the southern tier of U.S. States and Mexico. They occasionally show up in Japan and Korea, where a closely related subspecies lives, the Siberian or Japanese Pipet.