"Lake Cochise" in Willcox, Arizona, approximately 80 miles east of Tucson, is a large, rather deep sewage pond with a variable amount of exposed shoreline; it occupies a small portion of the Willcox Playa, an ancient lakebed now mostly dry.

Darlene Smyth and I visited the site yesterday afternoon; although we arrived too late to make a thorough survey or to carefully count the birds present, we did observe the following species of wader (the formula "more than n" means that our count had reached n when I looked at my watch and we sped around the rest of the lake):

Semipalmated Plover, 1 ad
Killdeer, ca. 8
Black-necked Stilt, more than 11
American Avocet, more than 27
Greater Yellowlegs, 2 ad
Lesser Yellowlegs, 5 ad
Spotted Sandpiper, more than 2
Long-billed Curlew, 31
*Semipalmated Sandpiper, 1 juv (a rare fall migrant here; likely the same individual my group had seen at the same site July 29)
Western Sandpiper, 2 juv, ca. 6 ad
Least Sandpiper, more than 2 juv, ca. 10 ad
Baird's Sandpiper, more than 5 ad
Dowticher sp., 5 ad
Wilson's Phalarope, the commonest shorebird present, a total of some 40, ad and juv

Rick Wright
Tucson, Arizona

Editor, Winging It
Department Editor, Birding

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