Godwit
Encyclopedia
The godwits are a group of large, long-billed, long-legged and strongly migratory
Bird migration
Bird migration is the regular seasonal journey undertaken by many species of birds. Bird movements include those made in response to changes in food availability, habitat or weather. Sometimes, journeys are not termed "true migration" because they are irregular or in only one direction...

 wading
Wader
Waders, called shorebirds in North America , are members of the order Charadriiformes, excluding the more marine web-footed seabird groups. The latter are the skuas , gulls , terns , skimmers , and auks...

 bird
Bird
Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

s of the genus
Genus
In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

 Limosa. They form large flocks on coasts and estuaries in winter.

They can be distinguished from the curlew
Curlew
The curlews , genus Numenius, are a group of eight species of birds, characterised by long, slender, downcurved bills and mottled brown plumage. They are one of the most ancient lineages of scolopacid waders, together with the godwits which look similar but have straight bills...

s by their straight or slightly upturned bills, and from the dowitcher
Dowitcher
The three dowitchers are medium-sized long-billed wading birds. They resemble godwits in body and bill shape, and the reddish underparts in summer, but are much shorter legged, more like snipe to which they are also somewhat closer related...

s by their longer legs. The winter plumages are fairly drab, but three species have reddish underparts when breeding. The females are appreciably larger than the males.

Although not common tablefare today, they were once a popular British dish. Sir Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric....

  writing in the seventeenth century noted that godwits "were accounted the daintiest dish in England."

Godwits are Waders (family Scolopacidae), called shorebirds in North America (where "wader" is used to refer to long-legged wading birds such as storks and herons). Godwits are large sandpipers with long legs and bills. Their long, subtly upcurved bills allow them to probe deeply in the sand for aquatic worms and mollusks. Godwits frequent tidal shorelines, breeding in northern climates in summer and migrating south in winter. In their winter range, they flock together where food is plentiful. A female Bar-tailed Godwit holds the record for the longest non-stop flight for a land bird.

The name Godwit originates in Old English with god meaning good, and wit coming from wihte, meaning creature.

Family Scolopacidae

Living and recent species

  • Genus Limosa
    • Black-tailed Godwit
      Black-tailed Godwit
      The Black-tailed Godwit, Limosa limosa, is a large, long-legged, long-billed shorebird first described by Carolus Linnaeus in 1758. It is a member of the Limosa genus, the godwits...

      , Limosa limosa
    • Hudsonian Godwit
      Hudsonian Godwit
      The Hudsonian Godwit, Limosa haemastica, is a large shorebird.-Identification:Adults have long dark legs and a long pink bill with a slight upward curve and dark at the tip. The upper parts are mottled brown and the underparts are chestnut. The tail is black and the rump is white...

      , Limosa haemastica
    • Bar-tailed Godwit
      Bar-tailed Godwit
      The Bar-tailed Godwit is a large wader in the family Scolopacidae, which breeds on Arctic coasts and tundra mainly in the Old World, and winters on coasts in temperate and tropical regions of the Old World...

      , Limosa lapponica
    • Marbled Godwit
      Marbled Godwit
      The Marbled Godwit, Limosa fedoa, is a large shorebird. On average, it is the largest of the 4 species of godwit. The total length is , including a large bill of , and wingspan is . Body mass can vary from ....

      , Limosa fedoa

Fossil species

In addition, there are two or 3 species of fossil
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

 prehistoric godwits. Limosa vanrossemi is known from the Monterey Formation
Monterey Formation
The Monterey Formation is an extensive Miocene oil-rich geological sedimentary formation in California, with massive outcroppings of the formation in areas of the California Coast Ranges, Peninsular Ranges, and on some of California's off-shore islands...

 (Late Miocene
Miocene
The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...

, approx. 6 mya) of Lompoc, USA. Limosa lacrimosa is known from the Early Pliocene of Western Mongolia (Kurochkin, 1985). Limosa gypsorum of the Late Eocene
Eocene
The Eocene Epoch, lasting from about 56 to 34 million years ago , is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the...

 (Montmartre Formation, some 35 mya) of France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 may have actually been a curlew
Curlew
The curlews , genus Numenius, are a group of eight species of birds, characterised by long, slender, downcurved bills and mottled brown plumage. They are one of the most ancient lineages of scolopacid waders, together with the godwits which look similar but have straight bills...

 or some bird ancestral to both curlews and godwits (and possibly other Scolopacidae
Scolopacidae
The sandpipers are a large family, Scolopacidae, of waders or shorebirds. They include many species called sandpipers, as well as those called by names such as curlew and snipe. The majority of these species eat small invertebrates picked out of the mud or soil...

), or even a rail
Rallidae
The rails, or Rallidae, are a large cosmopolitan family of small to medium-sized birds. The family exhibits considerable diversity and the family also includes the crakes, coots, and gallinules...

, being placed in the monotypic
Monotypic
In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group with only one biological type. The term's usage differs slightly between botany and zoology. The term monotypic has a separate use in conservation biology, monotypic habitat, regarding species habitat conversion eliminating biodiversity and...

 genus Montirallus by some (Olson, 1985). Certainly, curlews and godwits are rather ancient and in some respects primitive lineages of scolopacids (Thomas et al., 2004), further complicating the assignment of such possibly basal
Basal (phylogenetics)
In phylogenetics, a basal clade is the earliest clade to branch in a larger clade; it appears at the base of a cladogram.A basal group forms an outgroup to the rest of the clade, such as in the following example:...

 forms.

In a 2001 study comparing the ratios cerebrum to brain volumes in various dinosaur species, Hans C. E. Larsson found that more derived dinosaurs generally had proportionally more voluminous cerebrum. Limosa gypsorum, then regarded as a Numenius species, was a discrepancy in this general trend. L. gypsorum was only 63% of the way between a typical reptillian ratio and that of modern birds. However, this may be explainable if the endocast was distorted, as it had been previously depicted in the past by Deschaseaux, who is described by Larsson as calling the endocast "slightly anteroposteriorly sheared and laterally compressed."
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