Sandpipers, that family of birds that frequent shorelines, mudflats and open marshes to probe or pick for a meal of small invertebrates, are typified by the fact that they usually occur in flocks.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but most of the time when you see one yellowlegs you’ll see more nearby.

Some of the sandpipers take it to a greater extreme, with semipalmated sandpipers and western sandpipers congregating in flocks even in the hundreds of thousands at exceptional locations and times.

So a sandpiper species that is often found alone kind of sticks out as a bird that’s a bit different from the rest of the sandpiper family. In the case of the solitary sandpiper, this habit was striking enough that the bird was named for it.

But that’s not the only interesting thing about the solitary sandpiper. Almost all sandpipers nest on the ground, molding a shallow depression in moss, grass, or dirt. But solitary sandpipers instead find the old abandoned nests of robins, waxwings, blackbirds, and other species near the boggy wetlands that they inhabit in summer and there lay a clutch of three to five eggs.

Nests have been found as high as 40 feet! As in other sandpipers, the chicks of solitary sandpipers are hatched fully covered in down and able to walk and find food for themselves immediately. The young leap out of the nest to the ground and follow their parents to good feeding locations.

Solitary sandpipers are also different from the majority of sandpipers in the location of their breeding range and their habitat preferences. The majority of sandpipers nest in the open tundra, particularly in the Arctic or Sub-arctic, and most sandpipers tend to be found at some part of their life cycle in marine, coastal habitats.

Not so the solitary sandpiper.

Its breeding range is almost entirely confined to the Boreal Forest Region of Canada and Alaska, where it finds the wet bogs and shorelines of ponds and streams, where it prefers to nest.

And even in migration the solitary sandpiper is most often seen along the edges of freshwater lakes, ponds, and streams. Solitary sandpipers start migrating south through Maine as early as July and are one of few sandpipers that you may find even in tiny, catchment ponds surrounded by woods.

We came across several in the otherwise rather sterile-looking, stone-lined catchment ponds in the woods of the arboretum at Colby College in July. Even with the adults departing south as early as they do, it’s not uncommon to find some birds, mostly juvenile birds, still here in Maine into early October. But most of the population of solitary sandpipers will already be on the wintering grounds by then — along the muddy shorelines of rivers, lakes, and ponds of the Amazon Basin!