Salt Marsh means American Oystercatcher

NOTE: This post is publishing while I am away in Bequia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where the X-T5 is getting its first proper outing. Posts this week were scheduled in advance. We kept walking — further than I’d planned. The dirt road under the Stainton Memorial Causeway doesn’t look like much. It runs beneath the bridge near the Ocean City Welcome Center, and if you didn’t know to walk to the far end, you’d probably turn back before the marsh opens up. Bhavna and I kept going. We stopped where the road runs out and looked out toward Mermaid Cove. The salt marsh was mostly still brown — dried cordgrass flattened and pale in the April light, a few early green shoots pushing through the grit. And then, in that quiet landscape, two American Oystercatchers. Bold black-and-white plumage, long orange-red bills, yellow eyes catching the sun off the water behind them. They weren’t doing much. Just standing there on the sandy flat as if they owned the shoreline, which, in some sense, they do. A third bird stood a short distance away, alone among the dried cordgrass. Same vivid bill, same unhurried presence. I’d seen American Oystercatchers before — once, in April 2025, from the deck of the Osprey out of Cape May. That was a boat trip, movement, distance. This was different. We were standing still on solid ground, and the birds were close enough that I didn’t need to convince myself of what I was seeing. There’s something about a bird that loud-looking being so calm. That bill is almost absurd — saturated orange-red against a black head, the kind of colour that feels designed to be noticed. And yet the oystercatcher just stood in the marsh grass like it had nowhere else to be. I suppose it didn’t.