Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Spotted Sandpiper

By: Tom Berg

There are plenty of shorebirds in North America, but one of the most widespread and interesting ones is the Spotted Sandpiper. These attractive birds are the size of an American Robin, but that’s where the similarities end. The spotted sandpiper has a brown back and a white breast with lots of dark brown spots on it (during breeding season, anyway). Adults have an orange beak with a black tip, and they have a dark brown eye-stripe.

This bird is easily confused with other shorebirds like the Solitary Sandpiper and the Lesser Yellowlegs, but its unusual behavior often helps observers identify it. Spotted sandpipers walk along watery shorelines with a strange staggering or teetering motion. Some people even call them teeter-peeps. They bob their tails up and down as they walk, too, looking almost comical as they wade the shallows in search of food.

Since spotted sandpipers are shorebirds, they are almost always found along the shores of lakes, ponds, marshes, creeks and rivers. They love searching for food along muddy shorelines, but they are also often seen walking along floating logs and timber, picking off snails, aquatic nymphs and small insects. They especially like hunting among the stones and pebbles of rocky shorelines.

An interesting fact about spotted sandpipers is that the females arrive at the breeding grounds before the males, and the females defend the territory from other birds. Once the female lays her eggs, the male incubates them and after the chicks hatch he takes care of them. Meanwhile, the female often goes off and mates with another male, and lays another clutch of eggs for him to incubate. Surprisingly, one female may lay eggs for three or four different males during one breeding season!

This does not happen all the time, however. Some female spotted sandpipers are monogamous and only mate with one male during the breeding season. Breeding takes places throughout most of the United States (except the extreme south), including almost all of Alaska and north all the way through Canada.

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