Sandpiper
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Sandpiper. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a name applied to numerous species of the snipe family. The North American species are found from the Yukon Valley to the Gulf. They are strictly shore birds frequenting both the seacoast and inland waters . Of one species Chapman says: The thought of these little sandpipers always creates a mental picture of a long stretch of dazzling beach with its ever-changing surf-line. I hear the oft-repeated booming of the rolling, tumbling breakers, and in the distance see a group of tiny forms hurrying to and fro over the sand smoothed by the frothy waves. With what nimble gracefulness they follow the receding waves, searching for treasures cast up by the sea! What contentment and good-fellowship are expressed by their cheery, conversational twitterings! Up and down the beach they run, now advancing, now retreating, sometimes, in their eagerness venturing too far, when the waters threaten to ingulf them, and in momentary confusion they take wing and hover back to a place of safety. Suddenly, as though at a signal, they are off; a compact flock moving as one bird, twisting and turning to right and left, now gleaming white as the sun strikes their snowy bodies, now dark again like a wisp of sunless cloud flying before the wind . The sandpipers are small birds with straight bills. In a classification they stand between the snipe and the plover.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in ornithology, a popular name for several wading birds. Yarrell enumerates the following: The buff SANDPIPER breasted sandpiper (Tringa rufescens), Bartram's sandpiper (Bartramia longicauda, formerly Totanus bartramii), the common sandpiper or summer snipe (Totanus hypoleucus), the spotted sandpiper (Totanus macularis), the green sandpiper (Totanus ochropus), and the wood sandpiper (Totanus glareola). In ichthyology, the Petromyzon branchialis, the larva of which has been long known under the name of Ammocœtes.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The scientific names have almost all been rewritten since Collier's copied Yarrell's list in 1921: the genus Totanus has been dismantled, so the common sandpiper is now Actitis hypoleucos and the spotted sandpiper A. macularius, while the green and wood sandpipers remain in Tringa and the buff-breasted has moved to Calidris (C. subruficollis). Aiton's placing of the family "between the snipe and the plover" in 1910 still holds in spirit — sandpipers and snipes share the family Scolopacidae, set apart from the plovers. What Aiton's beach idyll could not foresee is the scale of the losses: North American shorebird numbers have fallen sharply since the 1970s, the red knot's rufa population was listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act in 2014 after horseshoe-crab egg supplies in Delaware Bay collapsed, and the spoon-billed sandpiper of eastern Asia is now critically endangered with only a few hundred pairs left. Leg-mounted geolocators and satellite tags have meanwhile shown that some of these "tiny forms" fly thousands of miles between Arctic tundra and South America, a feat only guessed at in 1910. Collier's second sense — sandpiper as a name for the larval lamprey, the ammocoete — has dropped out of use entirely.
Written for this edition, 2026.