{"id":168860,"date":"2025-06-29T06:19:35","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T12:19:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168860"},"modified":"2025-06-29T09:28:23","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T15:28:23","slug":"wilsons-phalarope-using-an-alternate-feeding-method-at-red-rock-lakes-nwr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/29\/wilsons-phalarope-using-an-alternate-feeding-method-at-red-rock-lakes-nwr\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilson’s Phalarope Using An Alternate Feeding Method At Red Rock Lakes NWR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wilson’s Phalaropes played a significant role in my bird photography on my recent camping trip to Montana’s Centennial Valley and Red Rock Lakes NWR. On one evening, while I was photographing birds at what I eventually began to call my “sweet spot” on Lower Red Rock Lake because it was so productive for birds, I had an interesting encounter with a lone male phalarope.<\/p>\n

Wilson’s Phalaropes are well known for their reversed sex-role mating system. Larger and more brightly-plumaged females compete for mates, while males provide all<\/span> parental care. Just the opposite of most birds.<\/p>\n

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Which I believe might explain why all or most of the phalaropes in this group are the more colorful females. It was breeding season and since incubation and brooding are done only by males, I suspect most of the males were on their respective nests.<\/p>\n

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This was one of the very few males I saw out and about while I was there. On a cloudy evening he landed very close to me while I was photographing Willets on the shore and I immediately noticed that he had a severe limp. In this and other photos I got good looks at his feet and legs and didn’t notice any injury, but he was obviously hurting and with limited mobility.<\/p>\n

His injury may (or may not) have affected his choice of feeding strategy. While feeding, Wilson’s Phalaropes typically employ a strategy called “spinning”, where the bird spins round and round in shallow water, creating a whirlpool that sucks invertebrates up to the surface where they’re captured and swallowed.<\/p>\n

But with his injured foot or leg, he couldn’t spin.<\/p>\n

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So he moved to shallow water and began to spear flying insects out of the air. He was good at it too.<\/p>\n

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There was an insect hatch going on so he had plenty of opportunities.<\/p>\n

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Here we see four of them all lined up, ready to be plucked out of the air.<\/p>\n

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In the next shot in the burst he got one of them too.<\/p>\n

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With his long flexible neck he was very good at snagging them out of the air, no matter at what angle they were relative to his body. All they had to be was “close enough”.<\/p>\n

At times his snapping angles were so extreme to the position and angle of his body I thought he might break his neck with one of his very quick and awkward-looking lunges. So, time and again I tried to capture his head and neck at one of those extreme angles, with very little luck. He was just too fast and my reflexes too slow.<\/p>\n

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This is as close as I came, but no cigar. Sometimes his upside-down head reached back so far it was behind his tail but I was never able to capture it in that position. The poor light and resulting shutter speeds that were often too slow didn’t help.<\/p>\n

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This huge crop of one of my photos gives us a fairly detailed look at one of the insects he was capturing. I’ve been at the refuge on other camping trips when this insect species was involved in a hatch. With their double ‘tails’ they remind me of mayflies but I don’t really know what species they are.<\/p>\n

I wish I did.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Notes:<\/em><\/p>\n