Tringa is a genus of waders, containing the shanks and tattlers. The genus name Tringa is the Neo-Latin name given to the green sandpiper by the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1599. They are mainly freshwater birds, often with brightly coloured legs as reflected in the English names of six species, as well as the specific names of two of these and the green sandpiper. They are typically associated with northern hemisphere temperate regions for breeding. Some of this group—notably the green sandpiper and the solitary sandpiper—nest in trees, using the old nests of other birds, usually thrushes.
The willet and the tattlers have been found to belong in Tringa; these genus changes were formally adopted by the American Ornithologists' Union in 2006.
The present genus in the old, more limited sense was even further subdivided into Tringa proper and Totanus, either as subgenera or as full genera. The available DNA sequence data suggests however that neither of these is monophyletic and that the latter simply lumps together a number of more or less closely related apomorphic species. Totanus is not therefore now accepted even as a subgenus.
Taxonomy
The genus Tringa was introduced in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. The name Tringa is the Neo-Latin name given to the green sandpiper by the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1603 based on Ancient Greek trungas, a thrush-sized, white-rumped, tail-bobbing wading bird mentioned by Aristotle. The type species is the green sandpiper (Tringa ochropus).
The genus contains 13 species.
Genus Tringa – Linnaeus, 1758 – thirteen species
Common name
Scientific name and subspecies
Range
Size and ecology
IUCN status and estimated population
Green sandpiper
Tringa ochropus (Linnaeus, 1758)
Breeding across northern Europe and northern Asia, wintering in western and southern Europe, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and...
