Willet (Tringa semipalmata semipalmata) 9 April 2009, Grande Island, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Same details as previous. This is a different bird with some retained basic feathering on the back, scapulars and wing coverts. I believe this was a female, as the presumed male was displaying overhead from telephone lines. Earlier I commented that the 47th AOU Check-List supplement inserted this species between the Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs. I have been advised that contrary to all reasonable expectations, Greater and Lesser yellowlegs are not each others' closest relatives. Evidently the similarity is due to convergence. Genetic data show that the Willet is more closely related to the Lesser Yellowlegs than either is to each other. More details at: http://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCprop227.html Full details of the molecular and morphological study are at: http://individual.utoronto.ca/sergiolp/pdf/Condor2005.pdf Nevertheless, the Willet is morphologically so different that, until recently it was placed in its own genus. I remain modestly skeptical of the adopted arrangement and note that several alternative Bayesian tree topologies are offered in the Condor paper. E.g. in Figure 1, the tree using nuclear DNA differs substantially from the one using mDNA and does not support such a close relationship between the Willet and the Lesser Yellowlegs. The statistical methods used to arrive at the various alternative trees are very interesting, but when they are based on only two Willet specimens, one of which has no date or locality information, and when the results are so clearly at odds with common sense, I tend to remain skeptical. Digiscoped with Panasonic DMC-LZ5 Nikon FieldScope 3 / 30X WA hand-held (no adapter)