Whenever you pick up a bird book, keep an open mind —  you never know what you might see. Birds that appear to be remote and exotic could someday cross your path. Mountain birds do fly down to the prairie, and sea gulls are seen on dry land. Those pictures in the bird book may come in handy when you stumble across those same birds in life.
     I came across an exotic bird when I was driving through the Texas panhandle. All alone in a High Plains pond was a Wilson’s Phalarope. Phalaropes are fabulously interesting birds. They aren’t true seabirds but are in fact aquatic sandpipers. They’re on the small side, only 8 to 9 inches, and they have several unusual feeding methods.
     They swim in a circle rapidly enough to make their own circular wake, and then they feed from it, picking tiny food items from a churning plume of water.
     Apparently, dizziness is not a problem for phalaropes, and they swim either clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on the bird, but they never alternate — they will spin in one direction all their lives.
     Most phalaropes live in the open ocean and breed in the arctic; only rarely do they pass through the High Plains. But there is one glorious exception, and that is the Wilson’s Phalarope, a regular High Plains visitor found near fresh water or salt, but never found at sea.
     The Wilson’s prefer the mudflats, playas, salt-water lakes, and shallow pools of the interior. Usually they are white and gray, and sometimes mistaken for sandpipers. And they’re known not only for spinning but for a frantic jabbing feeding dance. On stilt legs, they stab, poke, and flit their way along a muddy shoreline.
     Wilson’s are sometimes seen in great numbers in Nevada’s Carson Sink and Cheyenne Bottoms, Kansas.
     I had only the one in view, yet it was more than enough. To my surprise it was clad in the bright colors of the breeding bird. I remembered the pictures in the bird book, pictures of a gorgeous bird I thought I’d never see. And now it was right there in front of me.
     It was a white bird with outrageous accessories: A black bandit mask across the eyes drapes down the sides of the neck and shoulders, like two loose ends of a long black sash. The neck is a wash of peachy cinnamon spilling over the upper chest. Pearl gray wings with a cinnamon sprinkle, yellow legs, a gray cap, and a black stiletto bill complete the outfit. Because they breed in the northwest U.S. and northern High Plains, Wilson’s Phalaropes migrating north have already donned their flashy breeding costumes.
     My phalarope seemed to be engaged in that erratic feeding dance, poking in the mud and hopping around like an animal with fleas. I felt lucky indeed to be watching a male Wilson’s Phalarope in full breeding glory!
     Except it wasn’t a male, it was a female: in phalaropes the roles are reversed. Females are larger and they alone assume the gay colors of breeding season. They are also utterly disinterested when it comes to rearing young. They lay the eggs but do little else:  smaller, drabber male phalaropes incubate the eggs and raise the young alone.
     Perhaps all that spinning has confused the birds, but whatever the reason, phalaropes prove that the most unusual birds can sometimes be seen right in our own back yards.