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Ruff | Calidris pugnax
Kemphaan | Combatiente
The Ruff is a medium-sized wader with a small head on a long neck, a short, slightly decurved bill and an oval, pot-bellied body. On the breeding grounds in northern Eurasia the males display in their extravagant ruffs, but in southern Africa they are almost only seen in plain non-breeding plumage, then in large flocks on shallow inland waters.
Voice
Usually silent. On take-off sometimes a soft kuk or too-wit; flocks give a low twittering in flight.
Recording: Stanislas Wroza — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
Males 26–32 cm, females ('Reeves') 20–26 cm: the size difference is obvious in mixed flocks. In non-breeding plumage grey-brown above with dark feather centres and broad pale fringes, giving a scaly pattern; head and breast are drab, often with a whitish area around the bill base. Juveniles are warm buff on head and breast with a crisply scaled back. The legs are fairly long and range from greenish-grey to orange; the bill is dark, in some birds with an orange base. Before departure some males acquire dark blotches of breeding plumage. In flight a narrow white wingbar and conspicuous white oval patches on either side of the dark tail base.
Confusion species
Common Redshank Tringa totanus has a longer, straight bill with a red base, red legs and a white trailing edge to the wing. Wood Sandpiper Tringa glareola is smaller and slimmer, with a white rump and a clear supercilium. Pectoral Sandpiper Calidris melanotos has a streaked breast sharply cut off from the white belly. The vagrant Buff-Breasted Sandpiper Calidris subruficollis is smaller, with a round head, a fine black bill, yellowish legs and plain buff underparts.
Habitat
Shallow margins of pans, dams, sewage ponds, flooded grasslands and marshes, also salt pans and short grass fields after rain; on the coast mainly in saltworks and brackish lagoons. It eats insects, larvae, seeds and rice. It roosts in large, dense flocks, often of hundreds or thousands of birds.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Throughout the interior of the region, most numerous in Zambia, Botswana (Okavango Delta, Makgadikgadi), Zimbabwe and on the Highveld of South Africa; in Namibia mainly in the north and around Walvis Bay. Less numerous in the arid western Karoo and along the east coast of Mozambique; also in Angola and Malawi. Mostly females winter in southern Africa; males largely remain further north. Beyond the region it winters throughout sub-Saharan Africa and in southern Asia; it breeds from Scandinavia to eastern Siberia.
- Resident
- 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
Sewage works and shallow dams on the Highveld often hold hundreds of Ruffs from November to March. In such a flock note the size difference between the scarce males and the numerous females, and scan the Ruffs for rarer American and Asian waders.
Conservation status
Not threatened, but the European breeding population has declined steeply and the numbers wintering in southern Africa have also fallen considerably since the 1980s. Loss and drying out of shallow wetlands and changes in agriculture play a part.
Scientific name
Calidris pugnax | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Tringa Pugnax; 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. pugnax is Latin for 'combative', after the males' sparring at their display grounds. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.