Species Spotlight Challenge - Day 7 - Greenshank

Today's species is a bird called the Common Greenshank (in the UK it's mostly referred to just as the Greenshank), with the scientific name Tringa nebularia. It is part of a large group of birds known on this side of the Atlantic (to English speakers at least) as 'waders' and in North America as 'shorebirds'. The group includes all the sandpipers, plovers and many other familiar seaside and wetland birds such as oystercatchers, avocets and snipe. However, neither English name for the group is entirely appropriate as it includes many birds that either don't wade, (for example the sheathbills of the Antarctic), or aren't seen on the shore (such as the Ibisbill, which lives in high mountains in Asia), or don't do either, like the woodcocks which, as the name suggests, live mostly in woodland.

The Greenshank, however, does wade, and can be seen along the shore, although often at more inland sites as well. Its body is a bit larger than a Blackbird's but it has a long neck, long bill and  long legs, which are greenish, as the name implies. All these features equip it well for wading in water and mud, and for probing for the invertebrates on which it feeds, although they do sometimes eat fish. Greenshanks breed in the subantarctic zone of Europe and Asia, as far south as northern Scotland, where it nests in the boggy 'Flow Country' of Sutherland as well as on rocky hillsides. 

I really love Greenshanks and the sight of one always lifts my heart. They are so elegant and the silvery grey of their plumage is just so much more beautiful than the streaky brown of the related, and much commoner, Redshank. They even sound nicer than the noisy Redshank - Greenshanks have a lovely flutey call, usually of three notes in rapid succession. Their distinctive voice means that they can often be identified during their nocturnal migration flights, when it is dark and they would be too high to see in any case.

In most of the UK and Ireland your best chance of seeing a Greenshank is in coastal wetlands and estuaries during the spring and autumn on their journeys between their northern breeding sites and their wintering grounds as far south as South Africa. Smaller numbers spend the winter here in estuaries in the western half of Great Britain and all round the coast of Ireland.

The photos here were all taken this afternoon at the RSPB reserve of Saltholme, about 2km (as the crow flies) from my house. The picture below is a cropped version of a bigger photo and I'm including it (despite it being slightly blurry) because it shows the white on the tail, rump and going up the back. There is a very similar bird in North America called the Greater Yellowlegs, but as well as the different leg colour, that bird only has white on the tail and rump, making them very easy to distinguish in flight (although a Greater Yellowlegs would be extremely rare here).