A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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sanderling
The sanderling is a small pale sandpiper that runs along the edge of the surf on a wet beach, following the water down and sprinting ahead of it as it comes back in, feeding continuously. It is the palest of the small shorebirds in winter and the only one without a hind toe. It breeds on high Arctic tundra and winters on beaches on every continent except Antarctica.
Etymology
The name is Old English and appears to mean something like sand-dweller, though the exact formation is not settled. It is one of a set of bird names built the same plain way — sandpiper, sandgrouse, sand martin — where the habitat does the identifying because the bird itself is hard to describe briefly.
Notes
The running is not restlessness. The sanderling is exploiting the few seconds after a wave withdraws when small crustaceans are near the surface and still moving, so the bird is timing its feeding to the wave rather than to the beach. Its migrations are among the longest of any shorebird, and birds ringed in Greenland have been recovered in Namibia.