Purple Sandpiper

About the Purple Sandpiper

The purple sandpiper (Calidris maritima) is a small shorebird in the sandpiper family Scolopacidae. This is a hardy sandpiper that breeds in the arctic and subarctic regions of Eurasia and North America and winters further south on the Atlantic coast.

The purple sandpiper was formally described in 1764 by the Danish zoologist Morten Thrane Brünnich and given the binomial name Tringa maratina. This species was formerly placed in the genus Erolia, but is now placed with 23 other sandpipers in the genus Calidris that was introduced in 1804 by the German naturalist Blasius Merrem. The genus name is from Ancient Greek kalidris or skalidris, a term used by Aristotle for some grey-coloured waterside birds. The specific epithet maritima is from Latin and means "of the sea", from mare, "sea". The purple sandpiper is currently treated as monotypic with no subspecies recognised, though historically birds from Greenland were sometimes distinguished as C. m. groenlandica Løvenskiold, 1950 and birds from Iceland as C. m. littoralis (Brehm, 1831). Within the genus Calidris the purple sandpiper is sister to the rock sandpiper (Calidris ptilocnemis) and is closely related to the sanderling... Wikipedia →