All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Sandpipers and snipes › Red-necked Phalarope
Red-necked Phalarope | Phalaropus lobatus
Grauwe franjepoot | Falaropo picofino
The Red-necked Phalarope is a small wader that spends the non-breeding season on the open sea, where it floats like a cork and feeds in flocks along current lines. It breeds on Arctic tundra, and the American population winters mainly in the Pacific off Peru and Ecuador. A bird tagged in Scotland travelled via Iceland, Greenland and the east coast of North America across the Caribbean and Mexico to those waters. In the region the species is seen only rarely.
Voice
A short, sharp twit or kip, mainly in flight or from flocks on the water.
Recording: Stanislas Wroza — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
18–20 cm, small and finely built, with a short, needle-fine black bill and lobed toes. In non-breeding plumage grey above with white fringes, white below, with a white head, a dark rear crown and a black patch extending back from the eye. Juveniles are darker on the back, with two buff stripes, and have a buff-tinged breast. The breeding female is slate grey with a white throat and a chestnut neck; the male is duller. In flight a clear white wing bar and dark central tail.
Confusion species
Wilson's Phalarope Phalaropus tricolor is larger and longer-billed, lacks a wing bar and a black eye patch but has a white rump, and often walks on mud. Sanderling Calidris alba also shows a blackish mark at the bend of the wing and a white wing bar, but does not swim, has a thicker bill and runs along the surf.
Habitat
Outside the breeding season mainly on the open sea, where upwelling brings plankton to the surface. After storms or on migration also on salt ponds, lagoons and ponds just inland of the coast. When swimming it spins rapidly and picks small crustaceans and insects from the surface.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Rare passage migrant and vagrant, with records from the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, a few of the Lesser Antilles and the ABC Islands; often single birds at salt ponds, sometimes small groups at sea. Because there are few observations at sea, its true occurrence in Caribbean waters is poorly known. Outside the region it breeds around the whole Arctic and winters on tropical seas: off the west coast of South America, in the Arabian Sea and in the waters of Indonesia and New Guinea.
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Salt ponds and coastal pools after stormy weather in autumn, and pelagic trips along current lines. A small swimming wader that spins rapidly is a phalarope; the black eye patch and white wing bar point to this species.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Numbers at some important staging sites have declined sharply in the past; the causes are not fully understood.
Scientific name
Phalaropus lobatus | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Tringa tobata; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Phalaropus was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Phalaropus comes through French phalarope from Greek phalaris 'coot' and pous 'foot': like coots, phalaropes have lobed toes. lobatus is modern Latin for 'lobed', after the swimming lobes along the toes. The specimen the first description was based on came from Hudson Bay.