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Going to our car parked on our blacktop driveway in Halifax this morning, I surprised an unfamiliar small bird with a long bill which flew up and landed further up the driveway and just rested there. It presumably was a woodcock, more likely than a snipe. We got a good look at it but because of the strong backlighting from sunlight reflected off the blacktop, couldn't make out details of the plumage to be sure. It had a drop of fluid on the end of the bill, presumably a product of the salt gland? We thought it might have been exhausted, but it didn't wish to be captured and flew off strongly.
In looking this up in Sibley (2000), the snipe alternative is called a common snipe, Gallinago gallinago, but in a 2008 Smithsonian book that's a Eurasian rarity and the one here is identified as Wilson's snipe, G. delicata. Is the later book's identification of the snipe species current?
It's zero pickings for a woodcock here at present still with a couple of feet of snow, but my daughter says that the mud flats on the nearby Northwest Arm here are exposed, so there would be a possibility to feed there. Would a woodcock normally forage at tidal mudflats on the edge of saltwater? You'd wonder how much fat could be left on a migrant's body to see it through until the snow melts, or not.
Steve
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