Red-necked Phalarope Images

Red-necked Phalarope Images, Facts and Information:

Phalaropus lobatus

• Red-necked Phalaropes are the smallest of the phalaropes of North America. Red-necked Phalaropes have brown-striped dark gray backs with mottled gray breasts, white throats and bellies, gray heads, napes and flanks and have rust brown necks and upper breasts. They have needle like bills and slender necks. In winter plumage adults have gray crowns, eyes stripes and upper parts, their underparts are white.
• In breeding plumage the female Red-necked Phalaropes is the most colorful of the sexes.
• Phalaropes are the only shorebirds that regularly swim in deep water.
• Red-necked Phalaropes are migratory.
• Red-necked Phalaropes breed in the Arctic, in Alaska from James Bay to the Aleutians and on the southern coast of Greenland. During migration they can be found in hypersaline lakes like the Great Salt Lake, shallow rivers, lakes and mudflats. They spend winters near Peru, the southern Arabian Peninsula, and Indonesia.
• Red-necked Phalaropes eat small aquatic invertebrates, copepods, aquatic larvae of flies, fly eggs, beetles and spiders.
• Red-necked Phalaropes lay 3 to 4 eggs which take 17 to 21 days to hatch. Only the male incubates and he raises the young.
• A group of phalaropes can be called a “swirl”, “twirl”, “whirl” and a “whirligig” of phalaropes because of their twirling motion causing whirlpools when they feed at times.
• Red-necked Phalaropes can live up to 5 years.

I hope you enjoy viewing my Red-necked Phalarope photos.