Bird of the Month: Spotted Sandpiper
Spotted Sandpiper. Photo by Jeff Bryant.
By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President
When I was a beginning birder in the 1980s, shorebirds were the bane of my existence, especially those shorebirds birders refer to as peeps, five small very similar sandpipers you typically find along beaches or mudflats. I can remember crawling on my belly through a mudflat on a hot August afternoon decades ago, trying to get close enough to take a picture of a peep so I could (finally) identify it. Don’t worry. None of these peeps will likely ever be my bird of the month. But a year ago I introduced readers to another shorebird that’s very easy to identify by its ringing cry and its appearing in almost any rural and many urban open area—the Killdeer.
For August this year, I decided to write about the only other shorebird that spends all summer in Champaign County, the Spotted Sandpiper. I chose it because this bird is also very easy to identify which makes it, according to All About Birds, “a great ambassador for the notoriously difficult-to-identify shorebirds.” Unlike the Killdeer, you’re most likely to find the Spotted Sandpiper along an actual shore of a river, a stream, a lake, a pond, or even a small wetland. My most recent sighting of a Spotted Sandpiper was at the wetland at Weaver Park in Urbana. But I’ve also sighted them along the banks of the Sangamon River, McCullough Creek in Meadowbrook Park, Homer Lake, the Middle Fork River, and Point Pleasant wetland. Find enough water and you have a chance of seeing a Spotted Sandpiper, especially in late spring, and late summer to early fall, usually alone, sometimes with a partner.
So, what makes this shorebird so easy to identify? First, as its name suggests, both sexes of this robin-sized bird sport dark spots on their brilliant white breasts and bellies. You can’t miss them. However, during or after migration Spotted Sandpipers molt their breeding plumage and lose their spots. Then the second identification marker comes into play, how they behave. Spotted Sandpipers teeter when they walk, bobbing their tails up and down. Even when they’re spotless, you can still recognize them.
Like many shorebirds, Spotted Sandpipers eat what they find in or near water—small invertebrates (like insect larvae), beetles, worms, snails, small crustaceans, and even small fish. But unlike most shorebirds and the vast majority of birds in general, it’s the Spotted Sandpiper female that fights for territory, not the male, and the male who incubates the eggs and cares for their young. In fact, some Spotted Sandpiper females are polyandrous. This means that they mate with multiple males who build nests where she lays her eggs.
During August we will begin to see sandpipers in their unspotted winter plumage as they begin stopping over in our local streams, lakes, and wetlands on a migration that may have begun as far north as Hudson Bay and will end somewhere between the Gulf Coast and southern Chile. Spotted Sandpiper numbers that peaked in May will peak again in August before the last bird leaves in October. So, check out those shorelines this month!
How are Spotted Sandpipers doing? Unfortunately, not well. Their numbers have fallen more than 50% over the past 50 years down to 660,000. The destruction of wetland habitats they depend on for food and nesting sites has contributed to their decline. So has the deterioration of the waters that they depend on for food due to pesticides, herbicides, nitrogen pollution, siltation, and other causes. You can help by advocating for the retention of wetlands, cleaning shorelines, and reducing or eliminating your use of these chemicals, all of which end up in our watersheds.
