Red-necked Phalarope | Phalaropus lobatus

Voice

A high, short, sharp whit or chik, usually given in flight or when a swimming bird takes fright, alongside a low rolling cherre. It is a thin sound that hardly carries over water, and away from the breeding grounds the species is all but silent. In this map window you will therefore always see it before you hear it.

Identification

A small, lightly built wader of eighteen centimetres with a strikingly small head on a thin neck and a proportionately full body. The bill is short but needle-fine, dead straight and wholly black. The toes are lobed, as on a coot, and carry the bird on the water; the plumage is so dense that it floats high and light. In non-breeding plumage the upperside is silver-grey with pale lines down the mantle, the head and underparts are white, and a single black patch runs back from the eye — that head pattern, white with a black eye mask, is the decisive feature both on the water and in flight. Juveniles add a dark crown and a grey-brown wash over nape and shoulders. In breeding plumage it is the female that is the brighter: slate-grey head, white throat patch and an orange-red stripe down the side of the neck. In flight a clear white wingbar shows.

Confusion species

On the water confusion is barely possible: no other wader in this region habitually swims, and a small grey-and-white bird spinning in circles on a lagoon or at sea is here almost always this species. On land it is another matter. Then it suggests Red-necked Stint (Calidris ruficollis), but that bird is smaller, stockier, has a short bill thickened at the tip and lacks the black eye patch on a white head. Little Stint (Calidris minuta) is likewise smaller and blunter-billed. Sanderling (Calidris alba) is just as pale in non-breeding plumage but larger, heavier-billed and runs on the beach instead of swimming. No other phalarope is covered by this guide; if you see a swimming phalarope with a shorter, thicker bill with a yellow base, look harder, because then something more is going on.

Habitat

Outside the breeding season this is a seabird: it winters afloat on the open ocean, favouring upwelling zones and drifting foam lines where plankton gathers, and it sleeps simply on the water. Where it does touch land it picks shallow, open water: brackish coastal lagoons, estuary margins, saltworks ponds, sewage farms and inland lakes, always swimming or walking the very shallowest edge.

Range and movements

A scarce visitor from far outside the region. The species breeds right around the arctic belt and winters at sea, with the largest concentrations in the Arabian Sea and in the waters around New Guinea and Indonesia — just north of the map window — and further off the coasts of Ecuador and Peru. From those Indonesian wintering grounds a bird occasionally works further south into Australia, where it is a rare but in most years somewhere-reported visitor, usually a single bird on coastal lagoons, saltworks or sewage ponds. In New Zealand there are seventeen accepted records between 1929 and 2022, among them Lake Ellesmere, Miranda, Farewell Spit, Lake Grassmere and Waituna Lagoon. Sightings fall almost always between October and April.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Look at what is swimming, not at what is walking. On a coastal lagoon, a saltworks or a sewage pond, scan the open water between the ducks and the stilts: a small, pure white and grey bird drifting like a piece of polystyrene and spinning now and then in a tight circle is the find. Then check the bill — as thin as a needle — and the black patch behind the eye. At sea you may meet it along a foam line or a current edge, often in the company of terns, and there the bouncing, light flight gives it away first.

Conservation

Least Concern (LC). The species breeds in a vast, thinly settled belt right around the North Pole and winters scattered over open ocean, which keeps it out of reach of the coastal reclamation that hits the tidal-flat migrants of the East Asian flyway so hard. Even so, a bird that spends its whole winter afloat is sensitive to changes in ocean currents and plankton, to oil pollution and to swallowing floating plastic; clear local declines have been reported in North Atlantic populations. For this map window the point is that the species is rare here in any case and that every record counts on its own.

Scientific name

Phalaropus lobatus | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the bird in 1758 as Tringa lobata, partly on the basis of a plate by George Edwards, with the coast of Maryland as the type locality; because of the later move, author and year stand in parentheses. The epithet lobatus means 'lobed' and refers to the webbing along the toes. The genus name Phalaropus is compounded from Greek phalaris, 'coot', and pous, 'foot' — that too points at those same toe lobes, since a coot has them as well. The Dutch name franjepoot, 'fringe-foot', says the same thing in one word; 'grauwe', grey, separates it from its redder relatives.