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Red-necked Stint | Calidris ruficollis

Roodkeelstrandloper | Correlimos cuellirrojo

The Red-necked Stint is an Asian midget that crosses the Bering Strait: small numbers breed on the coastal tundra of western Alaska, at the very edge of a range that otherwise lies entirely in Siberia. In breeding plumage the brick-red throat is unmistakable; in winter plumage it looks like any other small stint. Almost the whole population winters in Australia and Southeast Asia.

Red-necked Stint (Calidris ruficollis) — Photo: JJ Harrison — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Voice

The flight call is a thin, high kreet or chrik, usually repeated as a party takes off. A flushed bird adds a short rattling trill. Over the tundra the male sings in a fluttering, gliding display flight: a drawn-out nasal corrick corrick corrick, alternating with a deep ooah. In North America you will almost always hear nothing but the call, and it is barely separable from that of Semipalmated Sandpiper.

No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.

Identification

A very small sandpiper with a short straight black bill, black legs and wingtips that reach past the tail at rest, giving it a long rear end. In breeding plumage the face, throat and upper breast are unstreaked rufous, sharply bordered by a line of dark spots along the sides of the breast; the scapulars are black with rusty fringes. In winter plumage it is plain pale grey above and white below with a faint pale eyebrow. Juveniles have rufous upper scapulars and plain grey lower ones, and only a weak white V on the mantle. Male and female are alike, the female averaging slightly larger.

Confusion species

In Alaska the hardest species to rule out is Little Stint (Calidris minuta): it has longer legs, a finer bill tip and, as a juvenile, a bolder white mantle V and a split eyebrow. Semipalmated Sandpiper (C. pusilla) has small webs between the toes and lacks the unbroken red throat; in breeding plumage it is drab where Red-necked Stint is rusty. Western Sandpiper (C. mauri) has a longer bill drooping at the tip and carries its rufous on crown, cheek and scapulars, not on the throat. A Sanderling in spring plumage is clearly bigger, thicker-billed and whiter on the belly.

Habitat

In Alaska it breeds on flat, wet coastal tundra and on drier hill tundra not far from the sea, usually in loose groups on moss hummocks. Outside the breeding season this is a bird of mudflats, estuaries, salt pans and shallow coastal lagoons, where it walks the waterline and pecks quickly rather than probing deeply. It makes little use of inland freshwater pools; open bare intertidal mud is its true habitat. In its Asian winter quarters it is one of the most numerous waders of the tidal flats.

Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.

Range and movements

The breeding range lies almost entirely in northeastern Siberia, from the Taymyr Peninsula east to Chukotka and northern Kamchatka; in North America it breeds only locally and irregularly in western Alaska, including the Seward Peninsula. On migration small numbers are seen every year on the Bering Sea islands and along the west coast of Alaska. From there it follows the East Asian–Australasian Flyway to Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Elsewhere in North America it is a rare vagrant, usually an adult still in breeding plumage on southward migration in July.

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

The map is a density field, not a drawn range boundary: it is built from the records themselves and therefore does not follow state or national borders. Both the seasonal colour and the depth of colour come, cell by cell, from the records of GBIF (2006–2026), counted per 0,7° cell and divided by all bird records in that same cell, so that the density of birdwatchers does not count. Every cell is counted separately for June–July, December–January and the migration months, and takes the colour of the season that wins there; a cell is only called summer or winter where the other season is nearly empty. Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).

Where and when to look

The best chance is early June on the coastal tundra near Nome or on the Bering Sea islands, when the birds wear the red throat and display flights are still under way. Elsewhere in North America it pays to work through flocks of small sandpipers in July: an adult with an unstreaked rusty throat stands out at once among drab Semipalmated Sandpipers. If in doubt, note the very short legs and the long wingtips, which make the rear body look stretched.

Conservation

The population is estimated at more than three hundred thousand birds, but numbers along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway are falling fast. The main cause is the loss of the tidal flats of the Yellow Sea, where the birds refuel on their way to Australia: land reclamation and port building have removed most of that mud. The IUCN therefore lists the species as Near Threatened (NT). Too little is known about numbers in the Alaskan part of the range to show a trend there.

Scientific name

Calidris ruficollis | (Pallas, 1776)

Peter Simon Pallas described the species in 1776 as Trynga ruficollis; because it was later placed in Calidris, author and year stand in parentheses. ruficollis is Latin for 'red-necked', from rufus (reddish) and collum (neck) — exactly what the breeding plumage shows. The genus name Calidris goes back to kalidris, the word Aristotle used for a grey waterside bird. The described specimen came from the salt lakes of Dauria, at Kulussutai in southern Transbaikalia.