Cox's Sandpiper: the species that never was

10/09/2019

In 1996, what was until then one of the world's rarest birds, Cox's Sandpiper, began to disappear from field guides and national lists. However, this was not another sad tale of human neglect leading to the extinction of a formerly widespread species. There was another reason the form was so rare: it was not a species at all. It was a hybrid between two well-known and widely distributed waders familiar to British birders: Curlew Sandpiper and Pectoral Sandpiper.

The saga of Cox's Sandpiper began in 1955. The first-ever vagrant Dunlins for Australia had been claimed and accepted, particularly as the species had predicted in the past, but as up to 20 records accumulated (some more convincing than others), some of the birds were considered to look anomalous. Australian ornithologist (and English immigrant) John Cox attempted to solve the ever-growing conundrum by collecting two specimens of this clearly rare form in 1975 and 1977 for the South Australian Museum.

Continued