thumb|Tringa glareola

The wood sandpiper (Tringa glareola) is a small wader belonging to the sandpiper family Scolopacidae. A Eurasian species, it is the smallest of the shanks, a genus of mid-sized, long-legged waders that largely inhabit freshwater and wetland environments, as opposed to the maritime or coastal habitats of other, similar species.

Taxonomy

The wood sandpiper was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the current binomial name Tringa glareola. Linnaeus cited his own Fauna Svecica that had been published in 1746. He specified the type locality as Europe but it is now restricted to Sweden. The species is considered to be monotypic: no subspecies are recognised. The genus name, Tringa, is the Neo-Latin name given to the green sandpiper (Tringa ochropus) in 1599 by Aldrovandus, based on the Ancient Greek trungas, a "thrush-sized, white-rumped, tail-bobbing" wading bird mentioned by Aristotle. The specific glareola is from the Latin glarea, meaning "gravel".

Description

The wood sandpiper resembles a longer-legged, more delicate form of the aforementioned green sandpiper (T. ochropus), or a solitary sandpiper (T. solitaria), albeit with a shorter, finer bill, brown back and longer yellowish legs. The wood sandpiper differs from the green by having a smaller, less contrasting white rump-patch, while the solitary sandpiper has no rump-patch, at all.

Breeding

The wood sandpiper nests primarily on the ground, or will re-use an abandoned tree nest of another bird species, such as the fieldfare (Turdus pilaris).

Sources

  • Wood sandpiper species text in The Atlas of Southern African Birds
  • Selected photos
  • Ageing and sexing (PDF; 1.8 MB) by Javier Blasco-Zumeta & Gerd-Michael Heinze