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Long Billed Dowitcher

© Fred J. Kane

Long Billed Dowitcher Limnodromus scolopaceus

The distinguishing characteristics of the Long Billed Dowitcher is their long straight, dark colored beak yellow, green legs, an ivory colored bottom and a tail checkered with black and white. The Long Billed Dowitcher, a medium sized shorebird has a short neck and a thick set body. It has dark spots on its throat and chest and stripes on its stomach and sides. The top of its head and eye liner are dark with a light ruddy eyebrow, dark green, yellow legs and a white lower back. As an adult it stands about ten inches tall with a wingspan of about eighteen inches. Both the male and female have similar plumage. Young Long Billed Dowitchers are colored gray with a white stomach.

While flying the Long Billed Dowitcher can be identified easily by its white "v" expanding up the back.

The average clutch size is four young birds and in about three weeks the young birds fledge. Their diet is almost exclusively aquatic invertebrates like mollusks, crustaceans, and marine worms, spiders with some seeds of aquatic and terrestrial plants on its menu. It eats in wet areas, probing with its long bill Also it will eat insects and insect larvae. The bird seeks it food by probing the mud with its long bill.

This species prefers mudflats, flooded fields and pastures marshes, sloughs, shallow ponds and other freshwater habitats.

Around the month of May the birds start winging their way north from Mexico and the Gulf States. This bird spends its summers in South Dakota, Northern Alaska and Northwestern Canada. During its migration north the bird is seen maintly in the western states and provinces. The Dowitcher is regularly seen in the autumn months in the east as it migrates to the Southern United States into Mexico The Long Billed Dowitcher is seen more often during their autumn migration in September and October. This dowitcher spends its winters along the coasts of the United States, Mexico, Guatemala and Central America.

In Calgary the Long Billed Dowitchers are among the most common of the migrating shorebirds. They first appear in May as Long Billed Dowitchers begin their migration north from Mexico and the gulf states to their mating and nesting grounds on the Arctic coasts and Canadian territories.

It mates and reproduces it young on the grass tundra and wet meadows in Northwest Alaska, in Canada in the Northern Yukon Territory and in Southeast Siberia,

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