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Orangeburg Sod Farm-Baird's & Buff-breasted Sandpipers



I birded the Super Sod farm in Orangeburg, SC this morning with Perry Nugent.  Between showers, we had some very good birds.  There were lots of puddles and large pools of water in the sod fields.  We worked all parts of the main sod farm, looping around twice to find what we did.

Main sod farm highlights (coming in past HQ):
1 American Golden-Plover (just before Intersection of Centipede and Supersod)
1 Baird's Sandpiper (near Centipede and Supersod - shortly after a right turn at intersection)
1 White-rumped Sandpiper
2 Upland Sandpipers

Satellite sod field (off US301 on opposite side of I-26 from sod farm HQ)
1 American Golden-Plover
2 Buff-breasted Sandpipers

We saw 250+ Pectoral, 12-15 Least and 3 Semipalmated Sandpipers as well as 10 Common Snipe, 24 Greater and 1 Lesser Yellowlegs.  We had around 40 Horned Larks.
We saw several hundred Chimney Swifts, hundreds of Barn and Rough-winged Swallows, a couple of Bank and one immature Cliff Swallow.

To head off any doubting Thomases: I am intimately familiar with Baird's Sandpiper from several fall migrations in Northern & Central California.  We had good comparisons with adjacent peeps and Pectoral Sandpipers. The bird's wing tips that extended well behind the tip of the tail, straight+thin+uniformly dark bill, small amount of buff/brown (no real streaking) in the breast pattern and clearly defined scaly back screamed immature Baird's.  The bird also had the leaner look of a Baird's for its length and lacked the better defined, more contrasting white supercilium of a White-rumped Sandpiper.  We got good scope views from around 30 yards, as the birds had gotten used to the car while we waited out a rain shower.

Nathan Dias - Charleston, SC