Calidris minutilla

Spent this afternoon at the Arcata Marsh watching the birds. After a dreary drizzly Christmas, it was sunny and pleasantly warm for December today. The winter light yielded terrific conditions for photographing the fine details and colors of the shorebirds feeding along the mudflats.

The Least Sandpiper is distinguished from the other common peep species of the California coast, the Western Sandpiper, primarily by the brownish tinge of its nonbreeding plumage and the greenish yellow of its tiny legs. The Least is in fact a much more frequent visitor to this stretch of shore of the Humboldt Bay; and so it is "least" only in size, not in numbers.