Lake Dillon Purple Sandpiper parking lot. Summit County.

[Joe Roller]

Lost and Found Department.

Found: 1 winter glove.

Please contact me, and I will return this to you.

Joe Roller, Denver

[ednbonniebaker]

Joe

I've got a question for you re: the survival of the Purple Sandpiper with no apparent food to maintain its strength and ability to move-on eventually

I've just gotta ask the question . . .

why can't we feed it mealworms or whatever it takes to keep him on this earth.

I don't see the harm in it; this is a very rare situation; all i can see is good from doing so.

Admittedly it's what I did for the Eastern Bluebird that came for a visit on my Bluebird Trail in Summit County.  It filled-up on mealworms during our April 2016 snowstorms; then after a week, moved on.

Bonnie Boex 

Dillon, Summit County, Colorado

[Joe Roller]

Good question. Bonnie.

Several quick-fingered shutter-bugs have captured the errant sandpiper pulling round worms

from the watery gravel where it has been feeding actively, much as robins pull earthworms from the soil.

So the Purple Sandpiper DOES have a food supply (although maybe be not seafood), and it has thrived for at least a week, feeding in the warm effluent waters

of Iron Springs, where it debauches into Dillon Reservoir. Who knows, the bird could have been there for weeks? If this were fall 

migration season, one could expect it to move on, responding to the urge to travel. But the bird may sense that it has reached

a good spot to spend the winter, so I would not mess with it. 

It may be difficult to see harm in supplementing the bird's food supply with mealworms, but there are possible consequences one cannot foresee. 

And at the very least, laying out a smorgasbord of mealworms could just happen a few hours or  a day or two before it decided to leave it's happy microhabitat.

And if that happened, whoever tossed the vermiform banquet could be blamed, even if blameless.

My 4 cents (inflation)

Joe Roller, Denver

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[Nathan Pieplow]

The Purple Sandpiper pulled up a LOT of food out of the creek during the hour that I watched it yesterday. I saw it gobble a bunch (10+) of those big roundworms that other people have photographed, and it was getting a lot of smaller prey items too, too small to see from a distance. At one point it hit the jackpot and gobbled about 40 of these smaller prey items in 30 seconds! Now, the situation may change, but as far as I can tell so far, the bird is healthy, and it's staying put because it's happy with the food options.

Nathan Pieplow

Boulder

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[David Wade]

Please do not feed or "help out" this wonderful first-time visitor. It is doing just fine on it's own, if it's not getting enough to eat here it probably would have moved on by now. The number of worms, midges, mayflys, caddisflys and other aquatic invertebrates living under the water would astound you.  I had a job once where I  counted over 10,000 teeny little critters from about  a quart of sediment taken from the bottom of a stream. This sandpiper is probing the mud for those live animals and most likely "feels" or senses them through it's long bill. This guy's dinner plate is the muck and mud just inches under the water. There is a chance it may not even recognize the dried inanimate meal worms lining the shore as food.

I can imagine a scenario where instead of the Sandpiper a  Robin finds the mealworms, tells it's buddies, and then there's a small flock of them chowing down near the Sandpiper. Next, a Goshawk from it's perch up on the hill above Hwy 9 sees it's lunch of Robins going to town on the mealworms at the shoreline.... Goshawk swoops in, Robins scatter and the hawk makes a quick change of menu to Sandpiper supper! What? it could happen.

David Wade
Ft Collins CO