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I can remember to the day learning to identify this bird–a White-rumped Sandpiper<\/strong>, photographed yesterday at Sandy Hook. It was at a shorebird workshop in Nebraska in the 1970s, conducted by Mary Tremaine, and it was a real eye-opener: Dr. Tremaine gave us all mimeographed pages introducing a strange and new way to identify shorebirds, using not plumage characters but shape and structure. She even produced a dichotomous key, with such odd choices as “More bird behind legs” and “More bird ahead of legs.”<\/p>\n All very conventional nowadays, though we have more precise, less impressionistic ways of talking about wing projection and such. But remember: this was thirty years before The Shorebird Guide, <\/em>twenty years before The New Approach<\/em>, nearly a decade before the National Geographic Guide<\/em>. Mary Tremaine was way, way ahead of her time, and I’ve often regretted not getting to spend more time at her figurative feet when I was a young birder.<\/p>\n As near as I can tell, she is quite forgotten today, a common enough fate for not-quite-famous birders who lived and died in a pre-internet age. Google turns up the odd citation<\/a> here and there, but nowhere, so far as I know, did she publish any sustained work on identification techniques. If she had, we’d be talking about her today as a pioneer in modern birding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can remember to the day learning to identify this bird–a White-rumped Sandpiper, photographed yesterday at Sandy Hook. It was at a shorebird workshop in Nebraska in the 1970s, conducted by Mary Tremaine, and it was a real eye-opener: Dr. Tremaine gave us all mimeographed pages introducing a strange and new way to identify shorebirds, … <\/p>\n