Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularia)

County List:

Rule:

Forested or Nonforested Landscapes

      (Lake or Pond or River)
   adjacent to:
      Shorelines/Mudflats

Habitat List:

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Literature:

Habitat: Breeding Spotted Sandpipers are generalists, favoring open areas near water. Suitable water may be temporary or permanent; they are found from sea level to the timberline and include ponds, lakes, and streams. Occasionally damp areas without standing water are used.

Oring characterized the Spotted Sandpiper as a pioneering species in which local populations are often ephemeral. New areas are colonized after human disturbance, for example, or during low water years, while other areas are abandoned from such causes as flooding and successional plant growth. This ability to use ephemerally available, early successional, or disturbed habitat probably insures the Spotted sandpiper will remain a common breeder in the state.

Habitat: Breeding: Breeds in vicinity of fresh water often along edges of ponds, lakes, rivers, or far from water in dry fields, pastures, and weedy shoulders of roads. Also uses coastal beaches and dunes. Prefers open terrain.

Habitat: Pebbly lake shores, ponds, streamsides; in winter, also seashores. Breeds near the edge of fresh water in a wide variety of settings, including lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, in either open or wooded country. In migration and winter also found along coast on mudflats, beaches, breakwaters; also on such inland habitats as sewage ponds, irrigation ditches.

Diet: Insects, crustaceans, other invertebrates. Feeds on wide variety of insects, also earthworms, crabs, crayfish, small mollusks, small fish, sometimes bits of carrion.

Nesting: Site is near water or some distance away, on ground under shrubs or weeds, next to fallen log, etc. Nest is shallow depression lined with grass, moss, sometimes feathers.