Red-necked Stint

Red-necked Stint are small waders, weighing about 30g (that’s equivalent to a Tim Tam for you chocolate lovers). It is the most widespread and numerous wader species in Australia found along the most shorelines and some inland habitats. The VWSG has been catching Red-necked Stints since the 1970’s, and through leg-flag resightings, we know that they migrate through Asia on a broad front with more frequent stopovers than many larger waders. Stopovers range from Indonesia, Vietnam Korea and the China coast.

In the summers between 2016/17 and 2019/20 the VWSG deployed 60 geolocators on Red-necked Stint in Victoria. Because of their small size, we fitted a miniaturised geolocator weighing only 0.3g (W30A9 Migrate Technology). We retrieved 19 geolocators from Red-necked Stint over the next 2 years. Red-necked Stints depart from Victoria around late April. With a number of stopover sites in Australia, Indonesia, South East Asia, the Yellow Sea of China, and Mongolia before going northern Siberia to breed. Unlike some other waders, such as Curlew Sandpipers, Red-necked Stints have many short flights and use a huge diversity of stop-over sights to refuel. They arrive at the breeding grounds throughout June and commence their journey south during July – early August. They arrive back at Yallock Creek from mid-September to late October after travelling approximately 24,000kms.

Map showing track of Red-necked Stint X778 from Yallock Creek, Victoria.

This work was done in collaboration with Deakin University and Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Germany. For more details about our work on Red-necked Stint, please refer to the following reports/publications:

Lisovski, S., K. Gosbell, C. Minton, M. Klaassen. 2020. Migration strategy as an indicator of resilient to change in two shorebird species with contrasting population trajectories. Journal of Animal Ecology, 90:2005–2014. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.13393