The Ruff, Philomachus pugnax, is native to Europe and Asia and an occasional visitor to coastal and Great Lakes regions of North America. A migratory bird, it spends winters in Africa and the near East, leaving to breed in the arctic and subarctic tundra by late May. Male and female Ruffs migrate separately, traveling in flocks of hundreds or thousands of birds. The males arrive in the breeding grounds first.
Ruff Breeding Behavior
Male Ruffs establish a territory on the breeding ground, or lek. When females arrive, they display their magnificent neck plumage, puffing up their feathers like an Elizabethan ruff and holding their wings open. The display features fluttering and jumping, crouching, and aggressive movements towards competing males.
Female Ruffs watch the males display and choose mates. Frequently, females mate with more than one male and have broods with more than one father. They establish nests some distance from the lek and raise young with no help from the male. Preferred nesting sites are in marshes, often in tall sedge where insect food is plentiful, and a good nesting site may hold many nests only meters apart.
Many male Ruffs do not visit the leks and are less likely to breed successfully, but some do mate with females and father young.
Ruff Male Types
Philomachus pugnax is a fascinating species in that there are three types of male birds:
- Eighty-five percent of males have a ruff of dark plumage at the neck and are territorial during the breeding season, each defending his own court at a lek.
- About 15% of males have light-coloured neck ruffs. These birds are not territorial and they share a court with the darker male, employing submissive behavior to gain the territorial bird’s acceptance. They help to attract females to the lek but mate less often than the dominant darker birds.
- Finally, there are males called faeders accounting for about 1% of the entire population. Faeders have the same plumage as females and visit the lek with the females, obtaining surreptitious mating opportunities. In some populations they appear to migrate with either male or female birds in spring and fall. Scientists think that faeders resemble the original males of the species, from a time before the showy ruff feathers evolved (the name faeder comes from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning father).
Ruffs Outside the Breeding Season
Male Ruffs moult their showy feathers at the end of the breeding season, and thus are much less eye-catching while on fall migration (males in spring may show breeding plumage). Flocks of these sandpipers visit coastal sand and mud flats to forage for insects and invertebrates on their way to and from the wintering grounds. Like a medium-sized typical sandpiper, they are pale below with brown backs and yellow, orange, red, or even greenish legs. Female Ruffs are smaller than males.
In their wintering grounds, Ruffs feed on insects, small fish, and invertebrates, frequenting shallow surface waters and roosting together in the shallows at the edges of lakes.
Birdwatchers that don't live in arctic or subarctic Europe, or Siberia, won't see male Ruffs showing off their impressive breeding plumage, but watch for these common sandpipers throughout Europe and the near East in spring and fall.
Sources
“Biometrics of Ruffs Philomachus pugnax migrating in spring through southern Belarus with special emphasis on the occurrence of ‘faeders.’” (2007) Karlionova, Natallia, Pavel Pinchuk, Wlodzimierz Meissner, and Yvonne Verkuil. Ringing & Migration 23, 134–140.
“How Male Ruffs Compete to Mate.” Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds. Perrins, Christopher ed. Buffalo: Firefly Books, 2003: 238-39.
Ruff - BirdLife Species Factsheet. BirdLife International
“Ruff Project.” Lank, David B. Simon Fraser University.
Rosemary Drisdelle - Rosemary Drisdelle has been published many times as a nonfiction writer and several times as a poet. Her first book, Parasites: Tales of ...
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