East Coast Wood Sandpipers
While the Wood Sandpiper is considered accidental, i.e. very rare, in the lower 48, it has been recorded breeding in the Outer Aleutians. It is even rarer on the east coast.
Wood Sandpiper- Delaware, 5/9/08
A Wood Sandpiper showed up in Rye, New York in early winter 1990. The sighting was covered in the New York Times. Check out the article, it quotes Roger Tory Peterson.
There is also a report from the NYSARC of a possible 1907 specimen although the committee is possibly unsure of the ID.
1907 Accepted Report
WOOD SANDPIPER (Tringa glareola). 1980-35-A. specimen, Gaines, Orleans Co., 10 Oct. 1907 (PDeB). The details of this first New York record are published in American Birds Vol. 34: 231; 1980. The Committee has attempted to ascertain the possibility that this is a mislabeled specimen. Our results are equivocal. The Milton S. Ray collection, from which this specimen comes, contains no other birds with similar labels; we would appreciate any further evidence that might corroborate the origin of this specimen.
-The New York State Avian Records Committee
So the Delaware Wood Sandpiper is a 2nd, possibly 3rd record for the east coast.
I suggest to the NY rare bird committee that they should read The Specimen Dealer: Entrepreneurial Natural History in America’s Gilded Age . Journal of the History of Biology.
v.33 No.3 Dec. 200 by Mark V. Barrows Jr., the dude who wrote the “A Passion for Birds” book.
The article mentions Frank Haak Lattin born in Gaines, who was a natural history dealer. Lattin also published the Oologist from Albion New York, but he lived in Gaines. He later sold his business to Edward H. Short. Short wrote a bird list for Western New York which got slammed by J. A. Allen in the Auk. Lattin wrote an article about birds from Orleans County in the Auk, in which he sort of slammed Short for not identifying a Baird’s Sandpiper. The same article implies Short was a taxidermist. Mr. Short sounds like just the sort of bird skins dealer who would not be able to pick out a Wood Sandpiper from a Solitary Sandpiper. Not that he necessarily shot the bird, the collecting of egg sets and skins was a big fad during this time. Mr. Ray out in California was a famous defender of oology. He wrote an article in the Condor about this. And he had a boatload of money with which he bought eggs and skins. The connection from Ray to Lattin or Short is not a stretch. Someone should find one of Lattin or Short’s specimens and compare them to the Wood Sandpiper.