Baird’s Sandpiper Iisuraar(aq)/Iiyuraar(aq)

by Frank Keim

original artwork by Frank Keim

Along with its relative, the Pectoral sandpiper, the Baird’s has long, tapering wings, which adapt it well for its very long annual migrations back and forth from southern South America to the Arctic where they nest. Like Pectorals, Baird’s sandpipers are also nicknamed “grasspipers” because of their preference to feed in drier, more vegetated habitats than many shorebirds. This especially includes rocky alpine south-facing slopes and exposed ridges with vegetation such as arctic poppies, both mountain and glacier avens, blueberries, tiny willows and other alpine plants that attract insects.

For this reason, you usually don’t see them flocking or foraging with other sandpipers that prefer wetter, muddier habitats. They eat mainly insects and other arthropods as well as spiders, insect larvae, and tiny pond crustaceans wherever they find them. They hunt for their prey by aggressively searching and catching them on the surface of the ground, although they will also probe in the mud for them.

When they finally get back to their breeding grounds in the Arctic tundra, including alpine areas in the YK Delta, there may still be snow covering much of the ground in their preferred nesting habitat. This is when you’ll hear them making their typical churring sound, which earns them the Yup’ik name Iiyuraar in Hooper Bay, or Iisuraar in the rest of the Delta. Since most of the other small sandpipers, affectionately called “peeps,” make a similar sound, they are also called by the same Yup’ik names.

As the snow melts, the males begin claiming nesting territories and “singing” their churring sound and others like trills and treeps while performing their flight display in hopes of attracting watching females below. In these displays, they fly steeply upward, at times over 100 feet high, then begin singing as they descend, alternating with a “butterfly” flight with slow wingbeats, hovering on trembling wings, then coasting to the ground with their wings held up in a V-shape. After this last performance, they give a doubled twoowee call.

If a female appears, the male rushes at the female with his bill down, back feathers raised, tail spread and cocked, giving trilling calls, then standing erect and raising a single wing – similar to the ground display of many of the other “peeps.”

Sometimes courtship and territorial defense displays with competing males look the same, unless followed by copulation.

Both male and female make a nest scrape with their feet and breast, then line it with soft plant matter. Both also help incubate the four large eggs, which are pinkish-buff to olive with dark brown splotches. When they hatch about three weeks later, the young are covered with down and leave the nest within 24 hours. Although both parents tend the young while they feed, their mother may depart before the young fledge, leaving her mate to finish the job. 16-20 days after hatching, the young take their first flight, and dad is also free for another year.

During their migration these sandpipers form small flocks of a hundred or more and usually travel apart from other species. Their migration takes many of the birds as far as the tip of South America, and they do it in record time. From when they leave their staging grounds in Alaska, those that travel all the way to Tierra del Fuego may complete their 9,300-mile journey in just five weeks. They winter from low elevations up to 15,000 feet. In the Andes Mountains they use cold, windy and lonely plains, short-grass meadows and grazed lakeshores like those near Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian Altiplano.

As with other long distance migrating shorebirds, the deterioration of the habitats they fly through has lessened their numbers, and will probably continue to do so. Since this species nests in the Arctic, it will also be vulnerable to the many negative effects of climate change.

Their English and scientific names, Baird’s sandpiper, and Calidris bairdii, were given to the bird in 1861 by the early American ornithologist, Elliot Coues, in honor of his teacher, Spencer Baird, who was the second secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. This was one of the last sandpipers described in North America.