Guide to North American Birds

Nesting in the far north and on mountaintops, American Pipits can be found throughout the continent during migration or winter. At those seasons they are usually in flocks, walking on shores or plowed fields, wagging their tails as they go. Often they are detected first as they fly over high, giving sharp pi-pit calls.

One of the most common birds of open country across Europe and Asia, the White Wagtail enters North America only as a scarce and local summer resident of western Alaska. There it seems to favor the vicinity of manmade structures: most of the nests found in Alaska have been in abandoned fishing huts, old gold dredges, empty fuel tanks, or piles of debris on the beach. Birders are likely to spot this wagtail first as it flies past, giving a metallic call, trailing its long tail in undulating flight.

Audubon called this bird the 'Missouri skylark,' because he found it singing in the sky over the prairies along the upper Missouri River. Sprague's Pipit delivers its breathy flight-song while hovering high in the air, often for minutes at a time, over the northern Great Plains in summer. In winter, it becomes an elusive skulker in the short grass of dry prairies. Unlike the American Pipit, Sprague's never occurs in flocks. Even where it is common in winter, the birds flush singly from the grass, to circle high in the air before diving steeply to land again.

This Asian species is common over much of western and northern Alaska in summer, nesting around scrub willow thickets on the tundra. If a birder intrudes on their nesting territory, a pair of Yellow Wagtails will often hover overhead, repeatedly calling in shrill voices.

Widespread across northern Europe and Asia, this pipit enters North America as a nesting bird only in a very limited area of western Alaska. There it breeds mostly at the western end of the Seward Peninsula, and on offshore islands such as St. Lawrence and Little Diomede. Surprisingly, a few Red-throated Pipits often show up along the California coast in fall. These lost migrants usually associate with flocks of American Pipits in open fields.

Although it forages mostly on the ground like other pipits, this Asian species also regularly perches in bushes and trees. It is a rare migrant in western Alaska, mostly in the outer Aleutians. It has also occurred as a very rare stray in Nevada and California.

Nesting across northern Siberia and wintering mostly in the Philippines and Indonesia, the Pechora Pipit is a long-distance migrant that has strayed to Alaska on rare occasions. It is even more elusive and harder to see than most pipits, hiding in dense grass and other low growth, flushing only at close range.