Eye of the Sanderling

Eye QÍJhe Sanderling Alan Poole The sanderling is the white sandpiper or "peep" ofsummer beaches, the tireless toy bird that runs before the surf. Because ofthe bold role it plays in its immense surroundings, it is the one sandpiper that most people have noticed. Yet howfew notice it at all, andfew ofthe fewer still who recognize it will ever ask themselves why it is there or where it might be going __ —Peter Matthiessen, "The Wind Birds" I see them first as a faint rippling in the sand, the smooth wet sand left behind as the waves retreat. My beachgoing reverie, nourished in part by the sheen of sunlight on that ribbon of ocean edge, is shaken ever so slightly as that sheen wrinkles an instant before the next wave slides up the beach to erase it. Wading into the water I see a few gray shells tumbling in the surf; my curiosity aroused, I dig into the soft wet sand and lift a handful. Instantly my hand comes alive: no dull, inert sand here, but a hundred kicking legs, digging into my fingers, tunneling, scratching, desperate to escape. Mole crabs! Emérita talpoida—egg-shaped, sandcolored creatures, not crab-like at all but domed and rounded like miniature VW bugs, perfectly shaped for burrowing in the sand, varying in size from barely visible to almost the size of a quarter, "living in the turmoil of broken waves on sandy beaches, moving up and down the beach with the tide, and . . . feeding on organic debris caught by feathery antenna," as K. L. Gosner so aptly summarizes this odd life in his Field Guide to the Atlantic Seashore. With dozens of mole crabs in each square foot of sand, filtering each retreating wave with "feathery antenna," no wonder the sand wrinkles and winks in the sun. It's alive . . . One of the unbroken rules of nature is that protein in abundance will be used. I drop my handful of mole crabs, see them disappear in a flash—scrambling gratefully back into the sand—and look ahead. A warm August beach stretches into the distance, holding just a few human swimmers and clusters of small birds, all seemingly chasing 170 Alan Poole the waves. But the birds look more purposeful, more intent. I lift binoculars and watch. Their legs spinning beneath them, these small white sandpipers work the edge of the surf with urgency and precision , staying just above the breaking waves, darting down as a wave retreats, fast beaks probing the wet sand like sewing machines, zipping back up ahead of foam and water. Not one gets drenched, barely wet even except for feet and legs, and from time to time one emerges with a smooth gray pebble in its beak, or so it seems. But I know better now, especially when I see that pebble worried in the beak, then swallowed fast and furtively before the chase resumes. Who are they, these diminutive white shorebirds that materialize suddenly each July and August along Atlantic beaches to glut on mole crabs, only to disappear—most of them—with the first cold winds of fall? What is the world their eye takes in? Sanderlings {Calidris alba) are among the most widespread of sandpipers, a group noted for spanning the globe in migration. Here in North America, the species breeds on high arctic tundra from the Alaskan coastal plain across an immense sweep of remote northern Canadian islands to Greenland. From there, seeking similar barren tundra, they scatter east, circling back around the northern extremes through Spitsbergen (Norway), Russia (Taymyr Peninsula, Severnaya Zemlya), and the Siberian arctic coast. Summer is brief at these remote latitudes. By early June, when Sanderlings arrive to court and lay eggs, daylight is constant but snowstorms are common, and the ground isjustbegging to thaw. It's a steelygray world, wet and raw with rare bursts of sunlight and color. A vast open world of small tarns, of lichens and moss and dwarf willows that grow in one hundred years no taller than a hands-breadth, no thicker than a pencil. In parts of the Sanderling's Canadian arctic, Musk-oxen ramble in small herds across these tundra...