Tringa
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[Photo] Green Sandpiper (Tringa ochropus). Photo by Marek Szczepanek (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pkuczynski/Marek_Szczepanek)

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Tringa is a genus of waders, mainly freshwater birds often with brightly coloured legs, a feature that is reflected in the names of six species. They are typically associated with northern hemisphere temperate regions for breeding.

The species in taxonomic order are:

Green Sandpiper, Tringa ochropus
Solitary Sandpiper, Tringa solitaria
Gray-tailed Tattler, Tringa brevipes - formerly Heteroscelus brevipes
Wandering Tattler, Tringa incana - formerly Heteroscelus incanus
Spotted Redshank, Tringa erythropus
Greater Yellowlegs, Tringa melanoleuca
Common Greenshank, Tringa nebularia
Willet, Tringa semipalmata - formerly Catoptrophorus semipalmatus
Lesser Yellowlegs, Tringa flavipes
Spotted Greenshank, Tringa guttifer
Marsh Sandpiper, Tringa stagnatilis
Common Redshank, Tringa totanus
Wood Sandpiper, Tringa glareola

Some of this group, notably Green Sandpiper, nest in trees, using the old nests of other birds, usually thrushes.

The Willet and the tattlers have recently been assignable to Tringa (Pereira & Baker, 2005); these genus changes were subsequently adopted by the American Ornithologists' Union (Banks et al., 2006).

Fossil Tringa shanks are known at least since the Mio-/Pliocene (c. 5 mya), possibly even since the Eo-/Oligocene (some 33-30 mya) which would be far earlier than most extant genera of birds. However, it is uncertain whether Tringa edwardsi indeed belongs into the present-day genus or is a distinct, ancestral form. The time of the shank-phalarope divergence has been tentatively dated at 22 mya, at the beginning of the Miocene (Paton et al., 2003); no fossils are known dating close to that time, but even if the dating is largely conjectural, it suggests that T. edwardsi does indeed not belong into the modern genus. Indeed, molecular dating (Pereira & Baker, 2005) - which is not too reliable however - indicates that the diversification into the known lineages occurred between 20 and 5 mya, which suggests that the evolutionary history of tattlers and relatives may not at all be documented by the known fossils.

?Tringa edwardsi (Quercy Late Eocene/Early Oligocene of Mouillac, France)
Tringa sp. 1 (Late Miocene/Early Pliocene of Lee Creek Mine, USA)
Tringa sp. 2 (Late Miocene/Early Pliocene of Lee Creek Mine, USA)
Tringa antiqua (Late Pliocene of Meade County, USA)
Tringa ameghini (Late Pleistocene of Talara Tar Seeps, Peru)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tringa

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