Calidris

Calidris
Red knot (Calidris canutus) in juvenile plumage, Brittany, France
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Charadriiformes
Family: Scolopacidae
Genus: Calidris
Merrem, 1804
Type species
Tringa calidris[1] = Tringa canutus
Gmelin, 1789
Synonyms
  • Philomachus Merrem, 1804
  • Ereunetes Illiger, 1811
  • Erolia Vieillot, 1816
  • Limicola Koch, 1816
  • Machetes Cuvier, 1817
  • Eurynorhynchus Nilsson, 1821
  • Crocethia Billberg, 1828
  • Canutus Brehm, 1831
  • Aphriza Audubon, 1839
  • Tryngites Cabanis, 1857
  • Micropalama Baird, 1858

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.[2] 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).[3] In North America, the smaller species are often known colloquially as peeps.

Their bills are flexible, able to exhibit rhynchokinesis,[4] 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.[5] Migratory shorebirds are shown to have declined in reproductive traits because of temporal changes of their breeding seasons.[6]

Taxonomy

The genus Calidris was introduced in 1804 by the German naturalist Blasius Merrem with the red knot as the type species.[7][8] The genus name is from Ancient Greek kalidris or skalidris, a term used by Aristotle for an unidentified grey-coloured waterside bird.[9]

Many of the species have been treated under other generic names at various times in the past, but these treatments leave Calidris polyphyletic;[10][11][12] synonyms are in brackets in the list below.

The genus contain 24 species:[13]

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.[12]

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. ^ "Scolopacidae". aviansystematics.org. The Trust for Avian Systematics. Retrieved 26 July 2023.
  2. ^ Hayman, Peter; Marchant, John; Prater, Tony (1986). Shorebirds. London: Croom Helm. pp. 182–209, 363–387. ISBN 0-7099-2034-2.
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ Estrella, Sora M.; Masero, José A. (1 November 2007). "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. Retrieved 24 February 2026.
  5. ^ Nebel, S.; Jackson, D.L.; Elner, R.W. (2005). "Functional association of bill morphology and foraging behaviour in calidrid sandpipers" (PDF). Animal Biology. 55 (3): 235–243. doi:10.1163/1570756054472818. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 June 2011. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
  6. ^ Weiser, Emily L.; Brown, Stephen C.; Lanctot, Richard B.; Gates, H. River; Abraham, Kenneth F.; Bentzen, Rebecca L.; Bêty, Joël; Boldenow, Megan L.; Brook, Rodney W.; Donnelly, Tyrone F.; English, Willow B.; Flemming, Scott A.; Franks, Samantha E.; Gilchrist, H. Grant; Giroux, Marie-Andrée (February 2018). "Life-history tradeoffs revealed by seasonal declines in reproductive traits of Arctic-breeding shorebirds". Journal of Avian Biology. 49 (2): 1. Bibcode:2018JAvBi..49....1W. doi:10.1111/jav.01531. ISSN 0908-8857.
  7. ^ Merrem, Blasius (8 June 1804). "Naturgeschichte". Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (in German). 168. Col. 542. Published anonymously.
  8. ^ Peters, James Lee, ed. (1934). Check-List of Birds of the World. Vol. 2. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 280.
  9. ^ Jobling, James A (2010). The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. London: Christopher Helm. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4.
  10. ^ Thomas, Gavin H; Wills, Matthew A; Székely, Tamás (24 August 2004). "A supertree approach to shorebird phylogeny". BMC Evolutionary Biology. 4 (1). doi:10.1186/1471-2148-4-28. ISSN 1471-2148. PMC 515296. PMID 15329156.
  11. ^ 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. Retrieved 12 September 2025.
  12. ^ a b Černý, David; Natale, Rossy (2022). "Comprehensive taxon sampling and vetted fossils help clarify the time tree of shorebirds (Aves, Charadriiformes)" (PDF). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 177 107620. Bibcode:2022MolPE.17707620C. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2022.107620. PMID 36038056.
  13. ^ AviList Core Team (2025). "AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2025". doi:10.2173/avilist.v2025. Retrieved 24 February 2026.
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