I was a little surprised to find that I’d only ever featured a long-billed dowitcher (Limnodromus scolopaceus) once before, because I was certain that I’d gotten other images of the species – and I had, even featured here before. Kind of. Here’s how it works.
The source that I’m using to find the ‘Just Once’ candidates is a dump from the database of tags that only appeared once before, just like the tag roundup at the beginning of each year. So they’ve only appeared once when identified by name. However, not only do they appear in the rotating banner at the top of the page, another frame from that same session was edited to use as a page break where needed, like so:
Curiously, this was discovered when I started this post and searched on “dowitcher” in the library of uploaded images for that photo above, finding two other hits – both the page break images, which then reminded me of the banner image. So yeah, they’ve been seen before, but not specifically named at the time.
The one at top was taken in Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina, five years ago (doesn’t seem that long to me, damn.) The others were all from Sanibel Island in Florida, like fifteen years ago – which was the last time we’d been to Florida, something that I keep vowing to correct and yet still haven’t. And it won’t be this year either, not even if someone funds it.