Two Birds With Unique Beaks

     When I was about nine to 13 years old, my family would rent a house in Margate City, New Jersey for a week in summer so we could walk to the beach and ocean every afternoon.  My favorite part of the whole day, however, was when I went to a nearby inlet in the evenings to watch gulls, herons, sandpipers and black skimmers.  The intriguing and entertaining skimmers were my favorite birds during those summer evenings at that inlet.  They flew, back and forth, low to the water with the lower part of their bills in the still water a bit to snare small fish that bumped their beaks.  Their bills left thin wakes in the water and when the mandibles bumped fish, the skimmers snapped their beaks shut to catch the finny prey and swallow it.  Those skimmers were particularly interesting when seen as silhouettes against the sunsets.     
     Black skimmers and American oystercatchers inhabit and nest on beaches and mudflats of the Atlantic seacoast from New England to Florida and around Florida to the Gulf of Mexico.  Though they are not related, they have at least a few characteristics in common, including being about 18 inches in length, dark on top and white below with red beaks.  And those bills are specialized to do specific jobs in food gathering along the seacoast.  Both these species rest on mud flats and sandy beaches on the shores of inlets, harbors and salt marsh channels off the ocean, as along other shorelines in the world.  Both these kinds of handsome birds gather in groups, with the skimmers having the larger congregations.
     But these species of birds have different food sources and unique ways of getting food, therefore they have different body shapes and beak structures.  Skimmers have short legs and lower mandibles that are longer than their upper ones for feeling for fish as they fly low to the water.  The oystercatchers have long legs for walking on beaches and flats and long, thin bills for prying open bivalve mollusks, including oysters, clams and mussels they find on the beaches and flats.  Obviously these two types of birds don't compete for food.
     Both these species of shoreline birds have lost habitat, and numbers, to people using those same coastal environments for recreation.  But both these species are hanging on where they can and even use human-made debris dumps near inlets to raise young on.  Those built beaches and flats help these birds recover from natural habitat loss. 
     The young of both species are born fuzzy and able to move about soon after hatching.  But they are fed by their parents until maturity.  Each pair of skimmers raises two young at a time while oystercatcher pairs rear two or three offspring in a clutch.    
     Look for these large, striking coastal birds when visiting the seacoast anytime of year, but particularly in summer.  They are attractive, and interesting, especially with their specialized bills.