Small wading bird

Usage examples of sandpiper.

Most were still asleep, heads tucked into their back feathers, sanderlings, dunlins, sandpipers.

Cassie moved slowly along the beach, oblivious to the terns and gulls wheeling overhead and the sandpipers skittering ahead of her as they searched the tidelands for morsels of food.

At the farthest tip, near Cape Sable, the sky flashed with wild birds: herons, curlews, ibises, blue egrets, white pelicans, sandpipers and a few roseate spoonbills.

Beside it was a photo of a prim old clapboard on Sandpiper Lane, set between giant rock maples.

I went in and out of the Tides, the Sun 'N' Surf, the Breakwater, the Reef, the Lagoon, the Schooner, the Beachside, the Blue Sands, the White Sands, the Sandpiper, and the Casa Del Mar.

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.

With a nervous twitch of his avian head and a wary frown, the watcher broke eye contact and slipped into the chattering crowd, lost as quickly as a slender sandpiper skittering among a herd of plump seagulls.

Mounting to her eyes, her vexation seized wherever she turned them to be seized in turn by the unwavering leer of the Masai warrior on the magazine cover displayed, along with Town & Country and a National Geographic, on the coffee table, and she picked up the bird book for refuge in godwits and curlews, sandpipers, snipe, the repose they conjured as quickly gone with another turn of the page and she was up and through the kitchen, tapping on the white door Mister McCandless?

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.

Now I looked around at the expanse of nipping, sharp sea, the gulls and sandpipers and husks of crabs and sand dollars, and then looked back to the twisted slats of dune fencing and willowy grasses taunting the wind, to the bird sanctuary.

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.