Biology:Calidris

From HandWiki

Calidris is a genus of Arctic-breeding, strongly migratory wading birds in the family Scolopacidae. These birds form huge mixed flocks on coasts and estuaries in winter. They are small to medium-sized sandpipers, long-winged and relatively short-billed; some are difficult to identify because of the similarity between species, and various breeding, non-breeding, juvenile, and moulting plumages. With a few exceptions, they have a fairly stereotypical colour pattern, being brownish above and lighter, usually white or buffy coloured, on much of the underside. They often have a lighter supercilium above brownish cheeks.[1] The species are variously known in English as sandpipers or (particularly the smaller species) stints; some have their own unique names, with dunlin (a mediaeval name meaning "[small] brown bird"), knot (imitative of its call), ruff (named after its male display plumage), and sanderling and surfbird (named after their habitat and behaviour).[2] In North America, the smaller species are often known colloquially as peeps.

Their bills are flexible, able to exhibit rhynchokinesis,[3] and have sensitive tips which contain numerous corpuscles of Herbst. This enables the birds to locate buried prey items, which they typically seek with restless running and probing.[4] Migratory shorebirds are shown to have declined in reproductive traits because of temporal changes of their breeding seasons.[5]

Taxonomy

Little Stint at Jamnagar, India
Temminck's stint at Jamnagar, India
Long-toed stint (Calidris subminuta) in Kerala

The genus Calidris was introduced in 1804 by the German naturalist Blasius Merrem with the red knot as the type species.[6][7] The genus name is from Ancient Greek kalidris or skalidris, a term used by Aristotle for an unidentified grey-coloured waterside bird.[8]

Many of the species have been treated under other generic names at various times in the past, but these treatments leave Calidris polyphyletic;[9][10][11] synonyms are in brackets in the list below.

The genus contain 24 species:[12]

The following species-level cladogram is based on a molecular phylogenetic study by David Černý and Rossy Natale that was published in 2022. Some of the nodes are only weakly supported by the sequence data.[11]

Calidris
 
 

Red knot – Calidris canutus

 
 
 

Great knot – Calidris tenuirostris

 
 

Surfbird – Calidris virgata

 
 
 
 
 

Ruff – Calidris pugnax

 
 
 
 

Sharp-tailed sandpiper – Calidris acuminata

 
 

Broad-billed sandpiper – Calidris falcinellus

 
 
 
 
 
 

Curlew sandpiper – Calidris ferruginea

 
 

Stilt sandpiper – Calidris himantopus

 
 
 
 
 

Spoon-billed sandpiper – Calidris pygmaea

 
 

Red-necked stint – Calidris ruficollis

 
 
 
 

Long-toed stint – Calidris subminuta

 
 

Temminck's stint – Calidris temminckii

 
 
 
 
 
 

Buff-breasted sandpiper – Calidris subruficollis

 
 
 
 

Sanderling – Calidris alba

 
 
 

Dunlin – Calidris alpina

 
 
 

Purple sandpiper – Calidris maritima

 
 

Rock sandpiper – Calidris ptilocnemis

 
 
 
 
 
 

Baird's sandpiper – Calidris bairdii

 
 
 
 

Little stint – Calidris minuta

 
 
 

White-rumped sandpiper – Calidris fuscicollis

 
 

Least sandpiper – Calidris minutilla

 
 
 
 
 

Pectoral sandpiper – Calidris melanotos

 
 
 

Western sandpiper – Calidris mauri

 
 

Semipalmated sandpiper – Calidris pusilla

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hybrids

Several hybrids have been discovered between different species in the genus. See Hybridisation in shorebirds for further details.

References

  1. ↑ Hayman, Peter; Marchant, John; Prater, Tony (1986). Shorebirds. London: Croom Helm. pp. 182–209, 363–387. ISBN 0-7099-2034-2. 
  2. ↑ Lockwood, William Burley (1984). The Oxford Book of British Bird Names. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 55, 92, 132, 133, 147. ISBN 0-19-214155-4. 
  3. ↑ Estrella, Sora M.; Masero, José A. (2007-11-01). "The use of distal rhynchokinesis by birds feeding in water". Journal of Experimental Biology 210 (21): 3757–3762. doi:10.1242/jeb.007690. ISSN 1477-9145. https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/210/21/3757/17198/The-use-of-distal-rhynchokinesis-by-birds-feeding. Retrieved 2026-02-24. 
  4. ↑ Nebel, S.; Jackson, D.L.; Elner, R.W. (2005). "Functional association of bill morphology and foraging behaviour in calidrid sandpipers". Animal Biology 55 (3): 235–243. doi:10.1163/1570756054472818. http://publish.uwo.ca/~snebel2/nebel05AnimBiol.pdf. Retrieved 2016-06-03. 
  5. ↑ Weiser, Emily L.; Brown, Stephen C.; Lanctot, Richard B.; Gates, H. River; Abraham, Kenneth F.; Bentzen, Rebecca L.; Bêty, Joël; Boldenow, Megan L. et al. (February 2018). "Life-history tradeoffs revealed by seasonal declines in reproductive traits of Arctic-breeding shorebirds" (in en). Journal of Avian Biology 49 (2): 1. doi:10.1111/jav.01531. ISSN 0908-8857. Bibcode: 2018JAvBi..49....1W. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jav.01531. 
  6. ↑ Merrem, Blasius (8 June 1804). "Naturgeschichte" (in German). Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 168: Col. 542. https://api.digitale-sammlungen.de/iiif/presentation/v2/bsb10502034/canvas/453/view.  Published anonymously.
  7. ↑ Peters, James Lee, ed (1934). Check-List of Birds of the World. 2. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 280. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/14483093. 
  8. ↑ Jobling, James A (2010). The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. London: Christopher Helm. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4. https://archive.org/details/Helm_Dictionary_of_Scientific_Bird_Names_by_James_A._Jobling. 
  9. ↑ Thomas, Gavin H; Wills, Matthew A; Székely, Tamás (2004-08-24). "A supertree approach to shorebird phylogeny". BMC Evolutionary Biology 4 (1). doi:10.1186/1471-2148-4-28. ISSN 1471-2148. PMID 15329156. 
  10. ↑ Gibson, Rosemary; Baker, Allan (2012). "Multiple gene sequences resolve phylogenetic relationships in the shorebird suborder Scolopaci (Aves: Charadriiformes)". Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 64 (1): 66–72. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2012.03.008. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1055790312001133. Retrieved 2025-09-12. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Černý, David; Natale, Rossy (2022). "Comprehensive taxon sampling and vetted fossils help clarify the time tree of shorebirds (Aves, Charadriiformes)". Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 177. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2022.107620. PMID 36038056. Bibcode: 2022MolPE.17707620C. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2021/07/16/2021.07.15.452585.full.pdf. 
  12. ↑ AviList Core Team (2025). "AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2025". doi:10.2173/avilist.v2025. http://www.avilist.org/checklist/v2025/. 

Template:Scolopacidae Template:Charadriiformes Wikidata ☰ Q30838 entry



Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Biology:Calidris&oldid=4325909"