American Pipit — Wings of NH

What you notice first

A slim brown bird walking — not hopping — across bare ground or a beach, bobbing its tail constantly, flushing with a thin "pip-it" and flashing white outer tail feathers.

Voice

The flight call is the name — a sharp, doubled "pip-it" or "tsip-tsip" given overhead. The flight song, heard only on the alpine breeding grounds, is a long descending trill delivered in a parachuting display.

Where & when

As a migrant — late September into November — on the Hampton and Seabrook beaches, plowed fields, and sod farms, often loosely with Horned Larks and Snow Buntings. As a breeder, the open fellfield lawns of the Presidential Range above about 4,800 ft, a tiny and hard-won population.

Why it's hard

Two different problems. The alpine breeders are a handful of pairs on the most exposed, weather-battered ground in the Northeast, at the very southern edge of an Arctic-alpine range. The migrants are genuinely regular but cryptic — brown, ground-hugging, and gone the moment you take your eye off the flock.

Most of the American Pipits that pass through New Hampshire were raised on Arctic tundra and are just crossing. A very few are raised right here, on the Presidential Range, which holds one of only two or three alpine breeding sites for the species in the eastern United States — the others are on a couple of Maine peaks. It is the same tiny island of habitat that supports Bicknell’s Thrush, one notch higher and more open.

In the field, the walking gait and the constant tail-bob separate it from every sparrow. Fall birds are warm buff below with blurry streaking, dark legs, and a thin bill — a pipit, not a finch, despite the shape.

On the coast, check the wrack line and the stubble fields in October. On the summit cone in July, check the lawns between the rocks, and tread carefully.