Grey-tailed Tattler Tringa brevipes 灰尾漂鷸
Category I. Passage migrant to intertidal mudflats and rocky shores, common in spring but scarce in autumn. Numbers have declined since the mid-1990s.
IDENTIFICATION
May 2004, John and Jemi Holmes. Adult, breeding plumage.
23-27 cm. Long-winged, long-bodied but short-legged, rather grey shorebird with yellow legs and extensive paler base to bill.
Adult breeding has whitish underparts with narrow brown streaks or bars on supercilium, throat, chest and flanks; greyish upperpart feathers with indistinct paler fringes, dark eye stripe from bill to short way behind eye and pale, dark-streaked supercilium below plain grey crown.
Oct. 2008, Martin Hale. Juvenile.
Juveniles such as this have pale spotting on the scapulars, tertials and wing coverts and a more obvious supercilium.
May 2021, Sarawak, Malaysia. Dave Bakewell.
Appears rather plain in flight apart from narrow white tips to greater coverts and narrowly barred uppertail coverts.
VOCALISATIONS
A vocal species that readily calls when flushed or in flight. The typical calls are a drawn out and inflected ‘cheeeoo’ or a shorter ‘chooo’ uttered two or three times in succession.
When agitated a shorter more urgent call is delivered in rapid succession.
DISTRIBUTION & HABITAT PREFERENCE
More than most species of migrant shorebird passing through HK, Grey-tailed Tattler is frequently recorded away from the Deep Bay area, though the highest counts are made in Deep Bay. Small numbers can be found at widespread coastal localities on shorelines of soft mud, sand or rocky coast. Thus, areas such as Sai Kung, Tolo Harbour and Tung Chung, in addition to islands such as The Brothers and Tung Ping Chau, may hold more birds on a regular basis than is at present recorded. The highest count away from Deep Bay is 52 at Tai Po on 30 April 1976.
OCCURRENCE
Grey-tailed Tattler is a passage migrant, though it is much more numerous in spring (Figure 1). The earliest spring record is of one on 31 March 2012, and the average arrival date during the period 1999-2020 is 12 April, making it the latest of the regularly-occurring migrant shorebirds to arrive despite the proximity of wintering birds in the South China Sea.
Single-figure counts only have been made before the middle of April, while a maximum of 80 has been noted during the second half of that month. The main passage period occurs in the first three weeks of May with a peak during the third week. The highest counts are 554 on 16 May 1987 (with 470 noted four days later) and 442 on 17 May 1994. However, the highest count this century is substantially lower at 239 on 16 May 2014.
Figure 2 illustrates the peak count in Deep Bay in spring since 1984 based on both casual records and the systematic shorebird counts since 1998. The number occurring each year is somewhat erratic, and in some years close to zero. However, it appears that numbers since 1995 have generally been lower than those in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially when one factors in the increased recording effort from 1998 when systematic shorebird counts began.
In most years a few birds remain during the summer, with the highest count being 58 on 20 June 2003, but there is a gradual decline as the summer turns to autumn. Autumn passage is noted in August and the first three weeks of September, the highest autumn count being 35 on 22 August 1987; in contrast, the highest count this century is 18. The latest record is of one at Sai Keng in Tolo Harbour on 23 November 2015.
Dove and Goodhart (1955) were the first to record Grey-tailed Tattler in HK, and they stated that it was a regular passage migrant with up to 12 from 14 April to 2 June and no more than two from 4 August to 19 October. Subsequently, Macfarlane and Macdonald (1966) noted a similar pattern of occurrence: up to 20 from 14 April to 19 October, with most records from Deep Bay.
BEHAVIOUR, FORAGING & DIET
Flies with a powerful and fluid wing beats when flushed from the coast. Usually forages singly. Generally, pecks at surface of mud between bursts of fast running, but occasionally probes below shallow water surface. Crabs are also taken.
RANGE & SYSTEMATICS
Monotypic. Breeds in two disjunct areas in north central and northeast Siberia, the latter larger and extending from Transbaikalia to Kamchatka and the former in the Putorana Mountains; winters coastally from islands in the South China Sea south through the Philippines and the Malay peninsula to Indonesia, New Guinea and Australia, with a few reaching New Zealand and Fiji (Van Gils et al. 2020). A migrant through the eastern half of China according to Liu and Chen (2020), who also indicate it winters in south China, including Hainan; however, based on the lack of records in HK at that time, it would appear Hainan and the Pratas Islands, which account for Taiwanese wintering records, lie at the northern edge of its wintering range.
CONSERVATION STATUS
IUCN: Near Threatened. Population trend decreasing.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Dove, R. S. and H. J. Goodhart (1955). Field observations from the Colony of Hong Kong. Ibis 97: 311-340.
Liu, Y. and Y. H. Chen (eds) (2020). The CNG Field Guide to the Birds of China (in Chinese). Hunan Science and Technology Publication House, Changsha.
Macfarlane, A. M. and A. D. Macdonald, revised by Caunter, J. R. L. and A. M. Macfarlane (1966). An Annotated Check-list of the Birds of Hong Kong. Hong Kong Bird Watching Society, Hong Kong.
Van Gils, J., P. Wiersma, G. M. Kirwan, and C. J. Sharpe (2020). Gray-tailed Tattler (Tringa brevipes), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, D. A. Christie, and E. de Juana, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.gyttat1.01
