Asian Dowitcher

The Asian dowitcher is a medium-large wader about 34 cm long and 180 g in weight. Its long, straight, blunt-tipped black bill, medium legs and long wings create a distinctive profile. Breeding birds are reddish on the head, breast and back with white underparts; winter birds are mottled grey-brown above and across the breast. It resembles a small bar-tailed godwit but is smaller, with a uniformly dark, straight bill rather than an upturned, pink-based one (New Zealand Birds Online).

Scattered breeding populations occupy lake shores, deltas, flooded meadows and bogs in the steppe and forest-steppe of Siberia, Mongolia and northeastern China. Migrants travel through East and Southeast Asia to coastal wintering grounds concentrated in Indonesia, with others reaching New Guinea and northern Australia. On intertidal mudflats they feed socially, driving the bill repeatedly into wet sediment with a sewing-machine action to extract marine worms, molluscs, insect larvae, crabs and other crustaceans (ESABII/BirdLife; New Zealand Birds Online).