Long-billed Curlew on the Artificial Prairie of Bentley Road

Here's a beauty of the process of evolution. The general activity in ecosystems is that everything that is alive eats other things that are alive, and everything that is alive tries not to be eaten. Evolution favors those organisms that are best adapted to survive in a given environment, even if they end up looking "weird". There are lots of birds and other creatures that like eating insects and worms that live in the soil, and some soil-based organisms have adapted to this fact by burrowing deeper into the soil, where they can't be accessed. Except for birds like the Long-billed Curlew (Numenius americanus). The bill is so long as to look almost ridiculous, but those extra inches provide the Curlew with the ability to delve deep into the mud or soil that others can't reach.

A huge flock of Long-billed Curlews have been spending the winter in some pasture-lands along Bentley Road near the town of Riverbank in the Great Valley. It's one of those rare grasslands that hasn't been plowed up and planted with almonds. The few times I've seen them they've numbered in the hundreds, but some birders report seeing several thousand at a time. It's a pretty incredible sight.

I got a minute of video showing them working the grass. If I were a worm, I'd be terrified...

Long-billed Curlews along Warnerville Road on the California Prairie

Sometimes you just see odd sights. We were visiting the California prairie a few miles south from where we saw and photographed the Horned Larks. We saw a flock of gray birds in the meadow, and from a distance I thought were maybe some doves, but as we drew closer we could see they had ridiculously long bills.

They were Long-billed Curlews (Numenius americanus)! I'm sure I've seen them before, but I can't find a single picture of one in my archives. It was a surprise to see so many of them out here, as I thought they were shorebirds. It turns out that they are, but they breed in grasslands, and will use their long bills to search for earthworms in the grass, as well as picking off larger insects like grasshoppers from the surface. They will migrate to coastal areas and wetlands and use their bills to dig for invertebrates in the tidal flats.

There were around sixty of them in the corner of the pasture. They didn't seem overly concerned about the traffic passing by (or the crazy couple in the car with the cameras).

We started down the road to look for the Great Horned Owls that we saw two weeks ago, and stopped a quarter mile away. By then something had spooked the flock and the entire group flew by, headed to places unknown.