There in the same area, we spotted a pair of Solitary Sandpipers. As someone once said, “Solitary Sandpipers are almost always found in pairs, so they aren’t very solitary, are they?” Several of the sandpipers appears similar in appearance to me, so unless someone points one out, I generally have to take a photo and compare it to my reference sources. These birds are smaller than a killdeer by a couple inches but are considered medium-sized for sandpipers. They are described by iBird as having brown-to-gray speckled upper parts, a white ring around their eyes, steaked neck and sides, white under parts, and yellow to yellow-olive legs and feet. They have dark tails with barred edges.

They breed in Canada and Alaska and fly south to southern Florida, central Mexico, and the West Indies south to central America (iBird) for the winter. They can be found in all parts of Oklahoma from early June to Mid October on their trip south and then again from late March to mid May as they fly back north. They like to forage in small, stagnant pools of water where they wade out breast deep and poke and stab at their prey. Their diet is mostly insects, supplemented by small crustaceans, spiders, mollusks, worms, and frogs (iBird). Here is a picture of the pair we saw foraging that afternoon.