Wood sandpiper

Voice

It nearly always calls as it flushes, and that is usually the first sign of its presence: a rapid, high, slightly nasal chiff-if-if of three or four syllables, hurried and cheerful in tone. Over the breeding bog it performs a drawn-out song flight with a yodelling, insistent tlee-dle tlee-dle tlee-dle. In the Netherlands you will hear almost only the flight call, from late April into September, and at night over inland country from birds passing overhead.

Identification

Small and slim, with a short straight bill, yellow to olive-yellow legs and a long pale supercilium that runs clearly behind the eye. The upperparts are brown with many conspicuous rounded pale spots, giving a spangled look at close range, and the finely streaked breast is sharply cut off against a white belly. In flight the square white rump, the finely barred tail and above all the pale grey, uncontrasting underwing catch the eye, while the feet project well beyond the tail tip. Juveniles are warmer brown with buff spotting and slightly duller legs, but that age rarely causes trouble in the field.

Confusion species

Green Sandpiper is the main confusion species: darker and dumpier, with a short supercilium that stops in front of the eye, a blackish-looking underwing, a broad black tail band and feet that barely clear the tail. Common Sandpiper is shorter-legged, creeps along in a crouch with a bobbing rear end, and shows a white wing bar and a white wedge in front of the wing bend. Juvenile Ruff can mislead at range, but is larger, small-headed, more hump-backed, with orange-yellow legs and no crisp supercilium.

Habitat

Shallow fresh water with bare or low-growing margins: wet grassland flooded to a film of water, clay pits, dredge deposits, sewage lagoons, rice fields and fish ponds. Where a Green Sandpiper picks a sheltered ditch, a Wood Sandpiper picks an open muddy edge with a clear view; it largely avoids salt tidal flats. It nests on the ground in open bog, swamp forest and wet birch mire in the taiga, occasionally in an abandoned thrush nest.

Range and movements

Breeds from Scotland — a handful of pairs — and Fennoscandia east through the Russian taiga, with the bulk of the population in Finland, Sweden and northern Russia. All European birds winter south of the Sahara, so the Netherlands sees passage only: a short, concentrated wave in late April and May and a broader return from late June into September. It does not breed in Spain, but is numerous on passage in the rice fields of the Ebro delta and La Albufera and in the marshes of Doñana.

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

Where and when to look

In early May walk a shallow-flooded field or a freshly inundated plot in the polder and scan the wet mud; Wood Sandpipers rarely stand far out in the water but work the margin itself. In August drying clay pits, sludge lagoons and newly created wetland sites produce the most birds. Go early: at sunrise they are settled, feed close to the bank and call at every move.

Conservation status

Least Concern globally, and with hundreds of thousands of pairs in Fennoscandia and Russia it is one of the commonest waders of the boreal zone. Along the southern edge of the range — Germany, Poland and the Baltic states — drainage of raised bogs has caused steep declines and local extinction. For migrants what matters most is the supply of shallow temporary water, and that has become scarcer as landscapes dry out and water levels are managed ever more tightly.