Waders Directory

The term ‘wader’ is synonymous with ‘shorebird’; both are used around the world to refer to the same group of birds. All waders are within the order Chardriiformes. Formerly we considered waders to be birds in the sub-orders Charadrii and Scolopaci.

Orders

CHARADRIIFORMES Huxley 1867 – comprises; CHARADRII (plovers, thick-knees, oystercatchers, avocets), SCOLOPACI (jacanas, sandpipers, snipes) LARI (Crab Plover, pratincoles and coursers, terns, gulls, skuas, auks and buttonquails).

Sub-orders

CHARADRII Huxley 1867 – plovers, thick-knees, oystercatchers, avocets.
SCOLOPACI Stauch 1978 – jacanas, sandpipers, snipes.
LARI Sharpe 1891 – Crab Plover, pratincoles, coursers, buttonquails (also; gulls, terns, skimmers, skuas, auks – not included on this website).

Recently a worldwide taxonomy has been published, called AviList: A Unified Global Checklist of the World’s Birds. This was a combination of (most) of the main ornithological authorities coming together to make the list universal. This list, at least for now, does not break orders into sub-orders, freeing us up to count whatever we wish to count as waders, free from the constriction of trying to fit into scientific boxes. Hence what you see here in the Wader Directory are the species contained within the seminal book on waders Shorebirds (Hayman, Marchant & Prater) plus Plains Wanderer and the Sheathbills. We do now follow the scientific findings of Avilist regarding species/subspecies status.

Click on the picture to read more about each family.