Although Baird's will sometimes show one or two fine feather shaft-streaks high up on the rear of the flanks there is one on this bird. In Baird's it will normally be clear white, whereas on White-rumped you will usually be able to detect some dusky streaks. So what do we look for? Well we often start with looking at the flanks of the bird. Baird's Sandpiper, Antofagasta, Chile - White-rumped Sandpiper São Paulo, Brazil I has not moulted any of the coverts which it will keep until it moults again and it still retains one or two of the bright rufous scapulars from its attractive juvenile plumage.

For interest the White-rumped Sandpiper is a juvenile bird moulting into its first non-breeding plumage.

If they had been taken in the same light the difference could well be even less marked. Side by side you can see that the White-rumped Sandpiper on the right is greyer than the Baird's on the left, but alone this difference is too subtle to detect easily and bear in mind that the Baird's is in the clear Andean sunshine, while the White-rumped is on a beach in Brazil on an overcast day. A lot of books talk about the Baird's being browner, but if you have a single bird, comparisons of this nature are useless, especially as tones and colours depend so much on light condition. Īs conscientious birders you will not want to disturb the bird and the other birds around it, so you may have to make your identification based on other features. If you see this feature, you can forget the rest of this blog. We don't have a suitable photo showing a Baird's rump and uppertail but trust me, they do not have white rumps, uppertail coverts or anything remotely similar. White-rumped Sandpipers do not have white rumps! As you can see they have white uppertail coverts. Naturally we do not encourage anyone to flush a feeding or roosting bird to make it fly, but if your bird does fly or preen itself conveniently, as one did for us at Cley on the first day of Wader Quest back in 2012, then you will not find it hard to spot the white uppertail coverts on the White-rumped Sandpiper, or, if your bird is a Baird's, that this feature is absent. So, we have seen the projecting wing tips so we know we have a Baird's/White-rumped to deal with. Connecticut, USA Both photos Elis Simpson. The other bird is a Semipalmated Sandpiper in breeding plumage and its wingtips are more or less in line with the tail tip. The bird on the right is a White-rumped Sandpiper in breeding plumage and you can see that its wing tips are noticeably beyond the tail tip. But if you look at the back end of the bird and flick your eyes from one to the other you can detect that the bird on the right looks so much more pointed attenuated they call it in the books. Look how horribly similar these two birds are! If you look at the colour and pattern of the upperparts they are almost identical, the brown mask and brown cap also very similar. In both these species the folded wing projects beyond the tail tip giving them a long pointed sort of appearance rather then the more blunt rounded back ends of most other similar Calidris waders. That first step is thankfully fairly straight forward.

I suppose the first thing to establish is that the bird is definitely either one or other of these two species. Although we haven't seen these species in all plumages (notably not juvenile Baird's), we think that now we have cobbled together enough experience and knowledge to tell the difference, so, here's how we do it. If, like us, you've always thought that telling a Baird's from a White-rumped Sandpiper was nigh on impossible and only for the experts, then this blog may help you.

White rumped sandpiper