This little bird is about the size of a Blackbird however stockier, with a tortoise shell pattern on its back and wings, a big dark cravat, white underpants and orange tights on its short stocky legs, quite the fashionista.
I’m not sure where Ruddy comes from perhaps its colour, Turnstone comes from its ability to turn over large stones, shells, seaweed and driftwood to get at sandhoppers etc, its known as quite the heavyweight lifter among our wading birds, the interesting thing too is they can work together to move a large object and though they don’t have webbed feet they are good swimmers, wow our shorebirds are so fascinating !
They breed in Siberia and migrate to NZ for our summer, thats a long way, around 27,000 kms, for quite a small bird its astonishing, heres a passage from NZ birds online about them..
“The ruddy turnstone is a circumpolar annual breeder on Arctic and subarctic tundra, mainly north of 60° N, making it one of the most northerly-breeding wader species. One bird was tracked in two consecutive years migrating from Alaska to Australia via the central Pacific and back to Siberia via the East Asian-Australasian flyway, each ’round trip’ a journey of 27,000 km. A bird banded in Invercargill has been recorded on southward migration through Broome in north-west Australia during September in three successive years. This, along with tracks of birds flying south to Australia via coastal China and Indonesia, indicates some birds migrate along the same route before continuing on to New Zealand. After spending the austral summer in New Zealand ruddy turnstones are thought to fly to the Korean Peninsula in north-east Asia before flying on to Siberian breeding grounds”.
Its estimated that only around 1,000 to 2,000 birds come to NZ each summer, they have even been seen on the Chatham Islands, Miranda shorebird center only usually records 10 birds there over the entire summer and now we had one here, how awesome is that ! Our beach is so important for our shorebirds.
The first sighting at Snells Beach was on the 18th of January 2020, they usually hang out close to the Dotterels, it was feeding along the tide line, its so exciting to add another species to our list.
That now brings our Shorebird species number to 28, 1 Hybrid and 8 Waterfowl, yee ha.