Waders of India
Four parts · complete · plus the interactive key
The framework
The bill key, the size ladder, the season, the sites and the craft. Everything that applies to every wader before you get to species — including why almost all of this happens in the four hours around a rising tide.
Read WADERS 02Sandpipers & stints
The small brown ones, where most of the difficulty lives. Thirteen species sorted by the one feature that settles each — Little and Temminck's, Wood and Green, Marsh and Greenshank, and the two months when Curlew Sandpiper stops being brown.
Read WADERS 03Plovers & lapwings
Run, stop, look, peck — the visual hunters, and the only wader group you can photograph without a tide. The sand plover measurement and the recent split, Kentish against Little Ringed, the two Pluvialis in spring, and the residents that never leave.
Read WADERS 04The long-billed
Godwits, curlews and whimbrel, plus the specialists — stilt, avocet, oystercatcher, thick-knee. Big, wary, deliberate birds that reward waiting rather than stalking, and the one identification that can only be settled in the air.
Read TOOLInteractive wader key
Thirty-six species, three steps. Pick the kind of bird, shortlist everything you cannot rule out, then compare them side by side — with the rows that differ highlighted, the rows that do not greyed out, and illustrated plates for the pairs that actually get confused.
OpenA note on what counts as a wader
The illustration above is exactly that — an illustration, not a photograph. Every image inside the guides is a photograph, credited where it is not mine.
This series covers shorebirds — sandpipers, plovers, godwits, curlews and their relatives. It leaves out herons, egrets, storks and ibises, which wade but are not waders in the sense used here, and which pose an entirely different photographic problem: single, large, mostly stationary subjects that will let you work them for an hour. They will get their own guide.