Dig That Crazy Beak

I am not even sure what kind of birds these are, but with a long orange beak like that, they shouldn't be too hard to look up. I ran into these guys in Tampa Bay, just off shore from Robinson Preserve, but on a different day from many of the other bird pictures I've shown you this evening. It was low tide, and I'd wandered out onto a sandbar that had formed around an inlet that feeds some of the salt marshes in the preserve. I happened to see these guys fly up, shot a few pictures, then they flew away as quickly as they arrived.

So a quick search of the internets tells me that this is an oystercatcher. Now we know. I don't know that I've seen one of these in the wild before, yet here were three of them. Actually, you can't see all three of them in any of these pictures, but there were three. Perhaps they were just migrating through, and I got lucky in catching them. Perhaps they're really common, and I've just missed them.