Tringa

Tringa is a genus of wading birds known as shanks and tattlers, named by the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1599 after the Neo-Latin word for the green sandpiper. Members are predominantly freshwater birds that breed across the temperate Northern Hemisphere, several with brightly coloured legs reflected in their English names, such as the redshank and greenshank; the green sandpiper and solitary sandpiper are unusual among waders in nesting in trees, reusing the old nests of thrushes and other songbirds. Genetic and morphological studies have shown that the willet and the tattlers, once placed in separate genera, actually belong within Tringa, a revision formally adopted by the American Ornithologists' Union in 2006, while the historic subdivision into Tringa proper and Totanus has been abandoned as DNA evidence found neither group to be monophyletic.