SPOTTED REDSHANK Tringa erythropus (Pallas, 1764)

Accepted: 5 (38%)	Treated in Appendix H: no
Not accepted: 8	CBRC review: all records
Not submitted/reviewed: 0	Color image: none

This lanky shorebird breeds across northern Eurasia and winters from the British Isles and western Africa east across southern Eurasia and the Middle East to Southeast Asia. The species is a very rare migrant in the western and central Aleutian Islands, casual in the Pribilofs. Vagrants occur casually or accidentally elsewhere in North America, with most records from eastern Canada and the Northeast. Mlodinow (1999c) reviewed New World records, two of which involve overwintering: south jetty of the Columbia River mouth, Oregon, 21 February–15 March 1981; Brooklyn, New York, 6 December 1992–18 March 1993, returning 30 November 1993–19 January 1994. More recent reccords come from central Texas in late September 2000 (Lockwood and Freeman 2004) and southeastern New Mexico on 25 July 2004 (alternate plumage; NAB 58:576).

California’s first Spotted Redshank, a male in alternate plumage, was present from 30 April to 4 May 1983 at the mouth of the Whitewater River in Riverside County. The five state records—all from a six-year period in the 1980s—are divided between spring birds in alternate plumage and fall birds in other plumages. A bird found on 25 October 1985 in the Santa Maria Valley, Santa Barbara County, was molting from juvenal to formative plumage, but a later fall migrant present 19–20 November 1988 on Staten Island in San Joaquin County was in either basic or formative plumage. New World vagrants have yet to be recorded in winter south of the United States, but California’s three spring records suggest that they probably have done so on very rare occasion.

 

[WOOD SANDPIPER Tringa glareola Linnaeus, 1758 – see hypothetical section]