All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Sandpipers and allies › Ruff
Ruff | Calidris pugnax
Kemphaan | Combatiente
The Ruff is the only wader here in which the male can be half again the size of the female: twenty-six to thirty-two centimetres against twenty to twenty-five. In Europe it is famous for the leks where males in coloured collars leap at one another, but here you see only the drab travelling uniform: a pot-bellied, small-headed bird with a long neck, a slightly decurved bill and legs that can be anything from greenish grey to bright orange. In Australia and New Zealand it is a rare visitor, usually at a sewage farm.
Voice
All but mute. Away from the lek a Ruff gives at most a muffled, low ook or a short throaty croak as it flushes, and even that is rare. On the northern display grounds nothing is called at all: the fighting is done in silence, with jumps, raised ruffs and lunges. Anyone who finds one here has to rely entirely on what they see — there is no call to give it away.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
A medium-sized to fairly large wader of unmistakable build: a full, drooping belly, a long neck and a small head, which leaves the silhouette looking out of balance. The bill is medium-length, slightly decurved and usually dark, sometimes with a paler base. The legs are long and their colour shifts strongly with age: dark greenish on young birds, orange, pink or yellow on adults. In non-breeding plumage it is plain grey-brown above with broad pale feather fringes giving a scaly pattern, and white below; old males often show a striking white face or head. The decisive feature is in flight: a narrow white wingbar and, on either side of the dark tail base, two sharply outlined white ovals. In breeding plumage the males carry the collar and ear tufts the bird is named for, in black, white, purple, chestnut or barred — but that plumage is almost never seen here.
Confusion species
Sharp-tailed Sandpiper (Calidris acuminata) is the mistake most often made, particularly with a small female Ruff: that species is smaller, shorter in leg and neck, has a rufous cap and breast streaking that fades out, and lacks the two white ovals at the rump. Buff-breasted Sandpiper (Calidris subruficollis) resembles a juvenile Ruff with its ochre breast and scaly back, but is smaller, shorter-billed, has a pure white underwing and likewise no white rump ovals. Marsh Sandpiper (Tringa stagnatilis) and Wood Sandpiper (Tringa glareola) come into it through the posture of a female Ruff in a freshwater pool, but have finer, straight bills and a white wedge or rump instead of two ovals. Bear in mind that two Ruffs side by side can look like two species: the size gap between male and female is the largest of any wader here.
Habitat
Shallow fresh water over a soft, muddy bottom: marshy meadows, sewage farms and settling ponds, flooded fields, the margins of inland lakes and reservoirs. It often wades belly-deep, feeding by both picking and probing for insects, worms and seeds. It does occur on estuaries and tidal flats, but far less often than the true shorebirds, and then usually on the upper edge near a freshwater outflow.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
A rare visitor from the Old World. The species breeds across northern Eurasia, from the Netherlands to Siberia, and winters mainly in Africa and southern Asia; Australia and New Zealand lie well outside that route, and the birds that reach here are overshoots. In Australia a single bird is found somewhere in most years, with records from every state and the best chance at treatment works and freshwater swamps in the southeast and southwest. In New Zealand there are eighteen accepted records since the first bird at Manukau Harbour in 1964, with others at Lake Ellesmere and near Miranda among them. Sightings fall almost always in the southern summer.
- Breeding (summer)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Work the sewage farms and the shallow freshwater pools rather than the tidal flats; this is a bird of inland mud. Look for a wader that does not add up: too full in the belly, too long in the neck and too small in the head, with a scaly back. Flush it and watch the tail base — the two white ovals flanking a dark centre are the feature that closes the identification, and they work in every plumage and at every age. Check the leg colour after that, but do not identify on it: in this species colour says more about age than about identity.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC) globally, thanks to a still large population in Siberia and a broad wintering range in Africa. Closer to people the picture is bleaker: the European breeding population was assessed as Near Threatened in 2021, and in western Europe the species has all but vanished as a breeder through drainage, early mowing and the fertilising of wet hay meadows. For Australia and New Zealand that has no practical consequence: here it is and stays a vagrant, and the number of records says more about the number of observers at the sewage ponds than about the state of the species.
Scientific name
Calidris pugnax | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the bird in 1758 as Tringa pugnax, giving Europe as the locality, in practice read as Sweden; because of the later move, author and year stand in parentheses. The epithet pugnax means 'combative' and refers to the mock battles at the lek. It then stood for a long time in its own genus Philomachus, from Greek philos, 'loving', and mache, 'battle' — the same thought twice over — until DNA work placed it in Calidris. The English name refers to the pleated collar fashionable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the female is called a reeve; the Dutch name kemphaan, 'fighting cock', is so familiar that it is used in everyday speech for a quarrelsome man.