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Little Stint | Calidris minuta
Kleine strandloper | Correlimos menudo
The Little Stint is the smallest wader that passes through north-west Europe in numbers each year, usually as a rusty-marked juvenile on a drying mud edge. It runs and pecks in a hurry, in short steps, while the Dunlin beside it probe unhurriedly.
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Voice
A short, dry, high tit, often in brief series as tit-tit-tit when a party lifts. The tone is sharper and drier than the scraping kreew of Dunlin and lacks the trilling quality of Temminck's Stint. Feeding groups keep up a soft, high twittering. In north-west Europe the call is mostly heard when birds are flushed off mud edges, and migrants often call as they pass over at night.
Recording: Xavier Riera — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Minute, with black legs and a short, straight, fine bill with a blunt tip, and a rounded head on a short neck. August and September juveniles are the most striking: bright white mantle lines forming a V on the back, a split supercilium, rufous-fringed scapulars and a clean white breast with no more than a smudge at the sides. Summer adults have rufous head and breast sides with a white throat; in winter they are grey-brown and plain, and then size and bill shape do the work. In flight a narrow white wingbar, a dark stripe down the centre of the rump and fast, slightly fluttering beats.
Confusion species
Temminck's Stint is the key confusion species: it has yellow-olive legs, an even grey breast band ending sharply against the white belly, no mantle lines and white outer tail feathers. Juvenile Dunlin are clearly larger, with a longer decurved bill and black spotting on the belly. Sanderling is bigger and whiter, lacks a hind toe and shows a broad white wingbar. Curlew Sandpiper is longer-legged and longer-billed, with a white rump.
Habitat
Shallow, bare or lightly vegetated mud edges where fresh and salt water meet: brackish lagoons, saltpans, coastal borrow pits, drawn-down reservoir shores, settling lagoons and sewage works. It takes insect larvae, small crustaceans and worms from the top few millimetres of mud, and almost always pecks rather than probes. On the breeding grounds it uses damp tundra with dwarf birch and sedge.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds in arctic Fennoscandia and Siberia and winters chiefly in Africa and the Mediterranean. North-west Europe sees a thin spring passage in May and a far more obvious autumn one — adults from late July, juveniles from mid-August — with most birds on the North Sea coast (the Delta, the Wadden shore) and on freshwater inland pools. In the Mediterranean a numerous passage migrant and locally a winterer, concentrating in the Ebro delta, Doñana, the saltpans near Cádiz and the lagoons of La Mancha.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Late August and early September are the best moments: find a drying brackish pool or a saltpan with a low muddy edge and work it through the scope metre by metre. The birds are so small that they vanish against the light; put the sun behind you and watch for the white V on the back. Late in the afternoon they come out to the open edges to feed, usually mixed in with Dunlin and Ruff.
Conservation status
Least Concern, with a very large world population. Numbers swing enormously from year to year, because breeding success on the tundra tracks the lemming cycle: in a lemming peak, foxes and skuas take rodents rather than nests, and an autumn follows with strikingly many juveniles. The threats lie mainly outside the breeding range, in the loss of shallow wetlands in the Sahel and around the Mediterranean.
Scientific name
Calidris minuta | (Leisler, 1812)
Leisler described the species in 1812 as Tringa minuta; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Calidris was introduced in 1804 by Merrem. Calidris goes back to Ancient Greek kalidris or skalidris, a name Aristotle used for an unidentified grey waterside bird. minuta is Latin for 'small', after the size of these smallest European stints. The specimen the first description was based on came from Hanau, Germany.