I almost didn't go up to the lake today. True, it was warm, and I'd certainly worked up enough of a sweat splitting wood and working on building a stone wall to have earned a swim. But the sun was in and out of clouds, the Red Sox were on TV, and I certainly had more I could do. Enough with the Calvinist guilt. Waiting for me, apres a delightful dip, was this sandpiper, clad in perfectly nondescript plumage. It was, however, bobbing up and  down as it walked along the lakeshore, and when I looked it up in various field guides, I figured out that its Spotted Sandpiper-like behavior was the key to its identity. That little bit of white where the wings meet the body, to say nothing of the orange legs and the white eye-ring, were the giveaway field marks of a non-spotted Spotted: an adult "wind bird" perhaps newly returned from the northern breeding grounds, or, because Spotteds may breed much closer to home, perhaps a recently molted, relative homebody.

Spotted Sandpiper, adult, winter plumage