These images of the juvenile Red Phalarope are from Mallard Lake, which is part of Big Lake WMA. This is located near Blytheville, AR, in Mississippi Co, and adjacent to Big Lake NWR.

This bird was 1st found in Saturday Oct. 3 2009. Jeff Wilson got word Sunday of it, and managed to relocate it (needle in a haystack) on Sunday with no specific directions. Several people have now seen the bird, which is the first in Arkanasas in 20 years or so.

I spent about 3 hours with the bird Monday morning, joined most of the time by Gail King. Not good conditions for photography, with heavy clouds and absolutely no Sun the entire time. This forced me to use ISO 1600 and f5.6 most of the time, to keep any shutter speed. Luckily the bird was very cooperative, and stayed just off the shore most of the time. Being this close though, at f5.6 most of the time I couldn't get the whole bird in focus! At times, the bird was actually too close to focus on, which is 11 feet with my lens!