Three Shanks

One of the three birds in the picture made me take another look or two at a guidebook. While the top-left is clearly a Greenshank with its slightly upwards curved bill, and the rightmost bird must be a spotted redshank (or as we Germans call it: a „dark waterwalker“ referencing its breeding plumage) due to its far protruding legs and the red lower but dark upper mandible, the third pied in the picture looked off - with too short a bill, a bit stubby, almost like a Calidris sandpiper, so maybe a Ruff? Not at all, Ruffs don’t have such a central white back spot in flight, and the back edges of the wings are never that white. It turned out (after some back and forth) that this must be a juvenile common redshank, which in their first year have a much stubbier bill which lacks the red base of upper and lower mandible, but that already has the dark hand feathers and the wide white back edge of the wings. What surprised me a bit is how much shorter the bill of the common redshank is than the spotted when seen side-by-side. The picture itself is not that great as taken from a distance and slightly behind but I thought it was still worth sharing for some species discussion.

Done