Spoon-billed sandpiper
species of bird
The spoon-billed sandpiper (Calidris pygmaea) is a small wader which breeds on the coasts of the Bering Sea and winters in Southeast Asia. This species is highly threatened, and it is said that since the 1970s the breeding population has decreased significantly. By 2000, the estimated breeding population of the species was 350–500.
Taxonomy
Platalea pygmea was the scientific name proposed by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. It was moved to Eurynorhynchus by Sven Nilsson in 1821. It is now classified under the calidrid sandpipers. Within the genus Calidris the spoon-billed sandpiper is most closely related to the red-necked stint (Calidris ruficollis).
Description
The most distinctive feature of this species is its spatulate bill. The breeding adult bird has a red-brown head, neck and breast with dark brown streaks, blackish upperparts with buff and pale rufous fringing. Non-breeding adults lack the reddish colouration, but have pale brownish-grey upperparts with whitish fringing to the wing-coverts.
“Spoon-billed sandpiper” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Spoon-billed, sandpiper and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28065684. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1758 and 1821.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spoon-billed sandpiper” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.