This past weekend I went to the Oregon Coast with Prior and we saw a lot of cool birds. The Brown Pelican was a fun one, and we saw both Pelagic and Double-Crested Cormorants, and this little guy called a Red Phalarope, well, really 3-4 of them. They were very cute little shorebirds just swimming around by the edge of the water.
They were hard to identify because this is what they look like in their winter plumage:
And there are a lot of other shorebirds who look vaguely like that, and they move constantly. This is the other bird I thought it might be (Snowy Plover):
Ultimately when you're looking at little bird guides or thumbnails and trying to gauge like "ok wait, how long was the beak again? where was that black patch?" and then looking to see how much variation any particular species has, it can be easy to neglect pretty easy distinctions like the fact that THE SNOWY PLOVER IS TINY AND THE RED PHARALOPE IS A LOT BIGGER. Though to be fair to me, even if you can tell in a photo that one is bigger and one is smaller, it's not always easy to have a solid reference to know how big is "bigger" and how small is "smaller" etc.
A much closer match that I was unsure about even after a lot of research later was the red-necked phalarope (insert indiana joke i'm allowed to make here):
I only confirmed it as a Red Phalarope when I came across two other, more experienced birders upon revisiting the site and going "hey what's that" and they said "red phalarope" and I was like "yes, thank you, okay!"
I also tried identifying some gulls and did a bad job. Identifying gulls is birding on hard mode.
I did see one distinctive gull, though! Bonaparte's Gull:
It was a black dot on a white neck in a crowd of easily 100+ gulls and ducks floating WAY out on the water, but I got an okay enough look at it to ID it, even if I'd like to see one up close sometime.