Redshank
Dismiss this seemingly average bird at your peril – it truly is the Saturday night TV dancing superstar of the birding world!
An ‘average’ bird that could be a TV superstar of the birding world, says Dominic Couzens
The Redshank isn’t well-named. The legs, or ‘shanks,’ are not red, but orange, so I propose that a change is made. The name ‘Orange-shank’ is too much of a tongue-twister, so here is the perfect alternative. The new English name for Tringa totanus should be ‘Midshank.’ It makes sense. Redshank is a mediumsized wader, dwarfed by a Curlew but towering over a Dunlin – so it’s middling in size. It has a medium-length, straight bill, lacking excessive length or curvature, but considerably longer than that of any plover, for example – so, a bill in the median range. The legs, too, are longer than those of a Knot or a Dunlin, but not as lanky as those of a godwit, or an Avocet, or indeed a Spotted Redshank. The legs aren’t extreme; in fact, they are classic Midshank. And then there is the voice. When you go birding on a winter estuary packed with flocks of waders, you just don’t come back saying “Oh, those calls of the Redshank were wonderful.” No, you come back with the ecstatic bubbling of the Curlew resounding in your memory, or the crystal clear, sweet melancholy of the Grey Plover. The Redshank’s calls are clean enough whistles, but not gorgeous. They are Salieri, not Mozart, not top 10, more – well, you know by now.
All-round dancers
If you or I were described as ‘middling,’ we probably wouldn’t like it. We would like to be exceptional instead. But when it comes to filling the middle space ecologically, you have a recipe for serious success. The Redshank, something of a generalist among waders, is one of the commonest and most widespread of its kind. Don’t confuse moderation with mediocrity. If you have spent time watching Redshanks foraging on the estuarine dancefloor, you might have noticed the extent to which they are all-rounders. If there was ever a competition for overall foraging adaptability, they would be sure-fire winners. On a series such as Strictly Come Feeding, the Redshank would walk it. On the touch-feeding tango, they would be experts. They would waltz across the mud, picking delicately from the surface with the sort of precision that would make a Strictly judge purr. At times they wade into the water and swish their bills from side to side like a plain-coloured Avocet, and they even enter into the world of the Turnstone at times, fox-trotting on to the seaweed and scooping items aside to see what was underneath. Redshanks samba into the late evening, foraging with unfettered facility even when it is quite dark. Metaphors aside, the Redshank truly is a physical marvel at turning the estuarine mud into a multi-course dining table. Its major expertise is a simple one, known as picking, where it uses its sense of vision to detect surface clues to the presence of edible animals. For example, a number of crustaceans, worms and molluscs live in burrows in the sand, and the Redshank’s keen eye allows it to recognise the burrows, and the straight bill enables it to prise the inhabitants out easily. Equally, however, the Redshank can detect food by touch, so, for example, if the mud is proving sticky, it can paddle into the shallows and swish the bill until it, half-open, knocks into articles in suspension, which are then snapped up. Its medium size and medium-length legs allow it to do this while the Dunlin, for example, is simply not tall enough. If it wished to swish, it would have to swim! Although the Redshank is fairly called a generalist, on an estuary it has a serious weakness for one organism above all, a small shrimp-like creature called Corophium volutator, a mini-crustacean about 1cm long that is in a group known as the amphipods. This is a relatively active creature which, although it usually lives in a burrow, will also crawl over the surface of the mud and even swim about – so a multi-pronged approach to foraging particularly helps when catching this species. Corophium is something of a keystone
IF EVER A BIRD REVELLED IN THE AVERAGE, IT WOULD BE THE REDSHANK. BUT IN THE MID-MUD, AVERAGE IS KING
estuarine tipple, providing food for other waders, too, although others have different preferences – the Knot, for example, prefers a seashell called Macoma, which is usually buried in the mud. However, Corophium can occur on the mud in extraordinary quantity; in the summer, when breeding, it can be found at densities of more than 10,000 animals per square metre. Occasionally it has been known to reach 100,000 per square metre! This is a gauge of the remarkable productivity of an estuary, when to us it can often look bleak and barren.
Feeding strategy
In winter, Corophium is less abundant, with only the new generation of amphipods surviving from the summer, but it can still be present in enormous quantities, especially in fine mud along creeks, and in the mud just next to growths of saltmarsh plants. Redshanks are, of course, experts at finding it, but circumstances sometimes make life harder for them. When the mud temperature drops below 4°C, for example, (which must surely happen a lot on a chilly estuary), Corophium tends not to come to the surface, making it harder to obtain, and much the same happens in heavy rain. In these circumstances, Redshanks still preferentially feed on amphipods, but they can often be forced to touch feed for shellfish such as the Knot’s favourite
Macoma, or perhaps for the large polychaete worms that are adored particularly by Curlews, which hold an obvious competitive advantage in obtaining these deep-burrowing animals. Redshanks can obtain these worms by checking the burrow entrances for movement, but they presumably rely on the animals being within reach, fairly close to the surface. When these birds paddle into the water (or very wet mud) to swish, they are adapting to find different prey, in this case crabs and shrimps. You might say, above all, that whether it be water or mud, these birds exploit the medium. As mentioned briefly above, Redshanks are so adaptable that they also feed frequently at night. This is a very useful trick in a regime dominated by the tides, when perfect feeding areas can be out of reach during part of the day. Presumably the birds feed mostly by touch during the night. Intriguingly, they feed more often on the open mudflats than in creeks at night, and individuals range over a much wider area, visiting more sites than they do by day, making it the fly-bynight midnight Midshank. It isn’t only in their feeding ecology that Redshanks are confirmed as embracing the non-extreme. It turns out that they are denizens of middle latitudes, too. Whereas many of the waders using our estuaries in the winter are those that only breed in the arctic and sub-arctic, Redshanks are much more temperatelyinclined. They nest in a range of both marine and freshwater habitats throughout Britain and in parts of Central Europe, where it is neither excessively hot nor excessively cold. There is an interesting quirk to their migration, too. Birds breeding in the furthest northern latitudes, such as arctic Scandinavia, migrate the furthest south, travelling to Africa for the winter. They ‘leap-frog’ over their more southerly breeding colleagues, such as those here in Britain, which remain in the country or move a short distance to the continent. Those breeding in the middle latitudes remain all year, becoming the middle-distance migrating Midshanks. If ever a bird revelled in the average, it would be the Redshank. But in the mid-mud, average is king.