Little stint

Voice

A short, dry, high tit, often in brief series as tit-tit-tit when a party lifts. The tone is sharper and drier than the scraping kreew of Dunlin and lacks the trilling quality of Temminck's Stint. Feeding groups keep up a soft, high twittering. In the Netherlands the call is mostly heard when birds are flushed off mud edges, and migrants often call as they pass over at night.

Identification

Minute, with black legs and a short, straight, fine bill with a blunt tip, and a rounded head on a short neck. August and September juveniles are the most striking: bright white mantle lines forming a V on the back, a split supercilium, rufous-fringed scapulars and a clean white breast with no more than a smudge at the sides. Summer adults have rufous head and breast sides with a white throat; in winter they are grey-brown and plain, and then size and bill shape do the work. In flight a narrow white wingbar, a dark stripe down the centre of the rump and fast, slightly fluttering beats.

Confusion species

Temminck's Stint is the key confusion species: it has yellow-olive legs, an even grey breast band ending sharply against the white belly, no mantle lines and white outer tail feathers. Juvenile Dunlin are clearly larger, with a longer decurved bill and black spotting on the belly. Sanderling is bigger and whiter, lacks a hind toe and shows a broad white wingbar. Curlew Sandpiper is longer-legged and longer-billed, with a white rump.

Habitat

Shallow, bare or lightly vegetated mud edges where fresh and salt water meet: brackish lagoons, saltpans, coastal borrow pits, drawn-down reservoir shores, settling lagoons and sewage works. It takes insect larvae, small crustaceans and worms from the top few millimetres of mud, and almost always pecks rather than probes. On the breeding grounds it uses damp tundra with dwarf birch and sedge.

Range and movements

Breeds in arctic Fennoscandia and Siberia and winters chiefly in Africa and the Mediterranean. The Netherlands sees a thin spring passage in May and a far more obvious autumn one, with adults from late July and juveniles from mid-August; the Delta, the Wadden coast and freshwater inland pools produce most birds. In Spain it is a numerous passage migrant and locally a winterer too, concentrating in the Ebro delta, Doñana, the saltpans near Cádiz and the lagoons of La Mancha.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Late August and early September are the best moments: find a drying brackish pool or a saltpan with a low muddy edge and work it through the scope metre by metre. The birds are so small that they vanish against the light; put the sun behind you and watch for the white V on the back. Late in the afternoon they come out to the open edges to feed, usually mixed in with Dunlin and Ruff.

Conservation status

Least Concern, with a very large world population. Numbers swing enormously from year to year, because breeding success on the tundra tracks the lemming cycle: in a lemming peak, foxes and skuas take rodents rather than nests, and an autumn follows with strikingly many juveniles. The threats lie mainly outside the breeding range, in the loss of shallow wetlands in the Sahel and around the Mediterranean.