Cousins of plovers

Usage examples of sandpipers.

Now Simon would be part of the carbon cycle, food for bacteria and crabs and then sandpipers and gulls, thus slowly melting into the biomass under the dome.

In some bird species, such as phalaropes and Spotted Sandpipers, it's the male that does the work of incubating the eggs and rearing the chicks, while the female goes in search of another male to inseminate her again and to rear her next clutch.

The best known of these female sultans are the shore birds called jacanas (alias lily-trotters), Spotted Sandpipers, and Wilson's Phalaropes.

For example, in 1975 a single mink destroyed every nest in a population of Spotted Sandpipers that the ornithologist Lewis Oring was studying in Minnesota.

Although the numbers of adult males and females may be equal, the ratio of sexually available females to males rises as high as seven-to-one among breeding Spotted Sandpipers and Wilson's Phalaropes.

That's true, for instance, of most sandpipers of the high Arctic, where the very short breeding season leaves no time for a second clutch to be reared.

Only among a minority of species, such as the tropical jacanas and southerly populations of Spotted Sandpipers, is polyandry frequent or routine.