Illustration © David Allen Sibley.
Learn more about these drawings.
Text © Kenn Kaufman, adapted from
Lives of North American Birds
Photo: Phil Brown/Flickr Creative Commons
Purple Sandpiper
Calidris maritima
| Conservation status | Numbers apparently stable or perhaps increasing. Breeding range is mostly remote from human impacts. Building of rock jetties along Atlantic Coast may have increased available wintering habitat. |
|---|---|
| Family | Sandpipers |
| Habitat | Wave-washed rocks, jetties. In winter almost always on rocky shores or rock jetties and breakwaters, foraging in zone below high-tide mark. Sometimes in areas of seaweed washed up on beaches. In summer on barren northern tundra, especially in rocky areas or ridges. |
Photo Gallery
Feeding Behavior
Clambers over rocks, seaweed, beaches, or tundra, looking for prey. Occasionally probes in mud, but usually finds food visually.
Eggs
4, sometimes 3. Olive to buff, blotched with brown. Incubation is by both sexes (but male often does more), 21-22 days. Young: May leave nest within a few hours after hatching. Young are cared for mostly or entirely by male; from the beginning, young find their own food. Age at first flight not well known, probably about 3 weeks.
Young
May leave nest within a few hours after hatching. Young are cared for mostly or entirely by male; from the beginning, young find their own food. Age at first flight not well known, probably about 3 weeks.
Diet
Mostly insects and mollusks. On breeding grounds eats mostly insects, also some crustaceans, spiders, worms. Unlike most sandpipers, also eats some plant material, including berries, buds, seeds, leaves, and moss. On migration and winter, diet is mostly small mollusks, including mussels and snails, also some crustaceans and insects.
Nesting
In territorial display, male flies in wide circles with wings fluttered above horizontal. Displays to intruders on ground by raising one wing high above back. Male may pursue female on ground or in the air. Nest site is on ground on open tundra, either in high rocky area or lower wet site, often among lichen or moss. Nest is shallow depression, with or without lining of grass, leaves. Male makes up to 5 nest scrapes, female chooses one.
Download Our Bird Guide App
- All Seasons - Common
- All Seasons - Uncommon
- Breeding - Common
- Breeding - Uncommon
- Winter - Common
- Winter - Uncommon
- Migration - Common
- Migration - Uncommon
Songs and Calls
A single or double twit or twit-twit.How climate change could affect this bird's range
In the broadest and most detailed study of its kind, Audubon scientists have used hundreds of thousands of citizen-science observations and sophisticated climate models to predict how birds in the U.S. and Canada will react to climate change.
Read more: climate.audubon.org
Each map is a visual guide to where a particular bird species may find the climate conditions it needs to survive in the future. We call this the bird’s “climatic range.”
The colors indicate the season in which the bird may find suitable conditions— blue for winter, yellow for summer (breeding), and green for where they overlap (indicating their presence year-round).
The darker the shaded area, the more likely it is the bird species will find suitable climate conditions to survive there.
The outline of the approximate current range for each season remains fixed in each frame, allowing you to compare how the range will expand, contract, or shift in the future.
The first frame of the animation shows where the bird can find a suitable climate today (based on data from 2000). The next three frames predict where this bird’s suitable climate may shift in the future—one frame each for 2020, 2050, and 2080.
You can play or pause the animation with the orange button in the lower left, or select an individual frame to study by clicking on its year.
