No one familiar with the famous story of the unfortunate sailors who were shipwrecked on Boon Island in December 1710 and fought to survive for weeks, with no fire, on the frigid, rocky, wave-smashed ledges would consider volunteering to repeat their ordeal. No human at least.

But believe it or not, to a purple sandpiper, these kinds of seemingly inhospitable ledges are its preferred winter home. Purple sandpipers breed in the High Arctic of eastern Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, and western Russia, and move south to rocky shores of eastern North America and Europe for the winter.

Here in North America, the largest numbers winter along the ice-free coasts from Maine north to Newfoundland and Labrador, though small flocks target rocky outposts including human-made rocky breakwaters interspersed on more sandy shores, even south occasionally to North Carolina. The person who gave them the name “purple” might be considered optimistic or creative, as most of us would describe them as generally more dark gray when we see them during the winter.

It is amazing on a bitterly cold winter day to be scanning the rocky edges of islands with a telescope, eyes are tearing up from the cold and wind, and see a flock of small birds wheel up and land on the dark rockweed. In the winter when so many other sandpiper species are basking in the sunshine of more tropical climes, purple sandpipers are dodging waves and finding invertebrates to eat right here in Maine, with the rest of us!

On the Pacific Coast of North America, there is a very similar relative of the purple sandpiper called the rock sandpiper that has essentially the same habits—in fact, there have been ornithologists in the past who considered purple sandpipers and rock sandpipers the same species. While our purple sandpipers are sometimes joined by wintering ruddy turnstones, rock sandpipers over on the Pacific Coast are also often found together with two other Pacific specialty birds: the black turnstone and the surfbird.

One of the most amazing bird discoveries in Maine was that of a surfbird last week at Biddeford Pool — a first for Maine and one of only very few records for the East Coast of North America. Not surprisingly, the bird was with a flock of purple sandpipers and ruddy turnstones.

Surfbirds are amazing migrants. They breed in the upper elevations of interior Alaska and the Yukon and then spread themselves along the entire Pacific Coast from southern South America north to British Columbia. Despite the fact that some of them make very long migratory flights, apparently a few get off track now and then and end up on the Atlantic Coast. Or perhaps not many birders regularly scan through flocks of purple sandpipers in the freezing cold of dead winter?

Maybe after this more recent find, more will!