About the Buff-breasted Sandpiper:

• It is one of the most delicately beautiful of the shorebirds.
• It breeds in the open arctic tundra of North America and usually in winters in South America.
• Habitat: Shortgrass prairies; in summer, tundra ridges. Migrants in North America mostly live on dry, open ground, such as prairies, pastures,
• The male Buff-breasted Sandpipers gather in groups on display territories called leks, where they flash their eye-catching underwings to compete for females' attention.
• It is a champion long-distance migrant, leaving high-Arctic dry tundra nesting grounds and migrating thousands of miles to winter on the grasslands of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. 
• Conservation status
  • IUCN: Near Threatened

Key facts about Arctic tundra

• It is the northernmost biome, which is a vast, dry, rocky place with few trees.
• It covers the land north of the Arctic Circle up to the polar ice cap.
• It reaches as far south as the Hudson Bay area of Canada and the northern part of Iceland.
• The word “tundra” comes from the Finnish word tunturi. This word means ‘treeless plain'.
• One important characteristic of the tundra is the permafrost. The word “permafrost” is short-form for the word “permanently frozen”.
• The ground in the arctic tundra tends to be rocky, and the soil has few nutrients. This is because the organic matter there breaks down very slowly.
• Despite the lack of trees, this biome is still considered a major carbon sink.
• This is due to the large amounts of organic matter found in deposits of peat and humus. 
• Temperature: Temperatures range from 15.5 °C in summer to -60 °C in winter. Mean temperatures are below 0°C for six to 10 months of the year.
• Annual precipitation: The annual precipitation is around 150 to 250mm. Most of this precipitation does not evaporate due to the low temperatures.