Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Hudsonian Godwits breed in the far north near the tree line in Alaska and northwestern Canada and, as the name suggests, on the shores of Hudson Bay; they winter in South America. In good weather, they can make the south-bound journey non-stop, which explains why most of my sightings of Hudsonian Godwits in Wisconsin and Minnesota have been in spring, including my lifer, which I saw in May 1977, at Goose Pond near Madison, Wisconsin. I also saw them in Kansas in April 2015. I would have missed the Hudsonian Godwit altogether in my 2013 Big Year except that I lucked into one at the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in Upstate New York on September 28. Despite my horrible photos, that was a very lucky sighting—during migration, most of them are seen on the East Coast from late July through early August. In June 2022, I saw two at the Westchester Lagoon in Anchorage, Alaska. They were not interested in being photographed, but at least were more cooperative than the ones I saw in NY in 2013.