All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Sandpipers and snipes › White-rumped Sandpiper
White-rumped Sandpiper | Calidris fuscicollis
Bonapartes strandloper | Correlimos culiblanco
The White-rumped Sandpiper is a long-winged sandpiper that migrates from the Canadian Arctic to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, one of the longest routes of any sandpiper. In autumn many birds fly from the Atlantic coast of North America over the sea to South America, which puts the Caribbean, and especially the Lesser Antilles, on the route.
Voice
A very high, thin, squeaky tseet or jeet, recalling a mouse or a bat.
Recording: Jacob Wijpkema — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
15–18 cm, with long wings that clearly extend beyond the tail at rest, giving an elongated, horizontal silhouette. The bill is black, slightly decurved, often with a reddish-brown base to the lower mandible; the legs are black. In winter plumage grey above, with a streaked grey breast and fine streaks continuing onto the flanks, and a white supercilium. Juveniles have rufous fringes on the back and crown. In flight a narrow white band above the dark tail stands out.
Confusion species
Baird's Sandpiper Calidris bairdii has equally long wings, but is browner and scaly, without a white band above the tail and without streaked flanks. Semipalmated Sandpiper Calidris pusilla and Western Sandpiper Calidris mauri are smaller and shorter-winged. Stilt Sandpiper Calidris himantopus also has a white rump, but has long greenish legs and a long bill drooping at the tip.
Habitat
Salt pans, shallow lagoons, mudflats, sewage ponds, rice fields and flooded pastures; less on sandy beaches. It often feeds wading in shallow water, probing the bottom rapidly with its bill.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Passage migrant on almost all islands, most numerous in the east and south: Barbados, Guadeloupe, Martinique and the other Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the ABC Islands and Trinidad and Tobago. Scarcer in Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Cayman Islands and San Andrés. Beyond the region it breeds on the tundra of Arctic Canada and northern Alaska and winters in southern South America, mainly Argentina.
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In September and October on salt pans and shallow lagoons in the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico. A long-winged sandpiper in a flock of Semipalmated Sandpipers is worth checking; the white band above the tail is only visible in flight or when the bird stretches its wings.
Conservation status
Vulnerable. The species has been placed on the Red List because of a steep decline. Much of the population uses a small number of stopover sites, which makes it sensitive to habitat loss. In the Caribbean shorebirds were formerly shot in large numbers on Barbados and in the French Antilles; restrictions now apply there.
Scientific name
Calidris fuscicollis | (Vieillot, 1819)
Vieillot described the species in 1819 as Tringa fuscicollis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Calidris was introduced in 1804 by Merrem. Calidris goes back to Ancient Greek kalidris or skalidris, a name Aristotle used for an unidentified grey waterside bird. fuscicollis combines Latin fuscus 'dusky, brown' with -collis '-necked', so 'dusky-necked'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Paraguay.