from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. An Old World wading bird (Tringa totanus) having long red legs.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. Either of two species of Old World wading bird in the genus Tringa that have long red legs.
- n. A bare-legged person; one of the Scottish Highlanders, who wore kilts.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A common Old World limicoline bird (Totanus calidris), having the legs and feet pale red. The spotted redshank (Totanus fuscus) is larger, and has orange-red legs. Called also redshanks, redleg, and clee.
- n. The fieldfare.
- n. A bare-legged person; -- a contemptuous appellation formerly given to the Scotch Highlanders, in allusion to their bare legs.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The fieldfare, Turdus pilaris.
- n. A wading bird of the family Scolopacidæ and genus Totanus, having red shanks.
- n. The hooded or black-headed gull, Chroïcocephalus ridibundus: so called from its red legs: more fully called redshank gull and red-legged gull or mew.
- n. plural A name given in contempt to Scottish Highlanders, and formerly to native Irish, in allusion to their dress leaving the legs exposed.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. a common Old World wading bird with long red legs
A hooded crow, large and muscular beside the smaller waders, stabs its way through the pile, not once bothering to look up, while a single redshank steps daintily across the weed's surface in search of a likely area to pick over.
Some, such as the oystercatchers, redshank and curlew, were still finding food by probing with their beaks.
A whitethroat flies out over the salt marsh from its grassed nesting bank on the most recent seawall, singing its dry ratchet song over the slippery green ooze; a redshank agitated by a marsh harrier towers inland over emerald wheat fields calling its bleak mud-flat alarm.
The most abundant are dunlin (Calidris alpina), bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica), curlew sandpiper (Calidris ferruginea) and redshank (Tringa totanus) all with populations of over 100,000 birds.
Birds with restricted range include the spotted redshank (Tringa erythropus), Jananese Robin (Erithacus akahige), Bull-headed Strike (Lanius bucephalus), and the Forest Wagtail (Motacilla lutea).
The haunts of the mallard, the snipe, the redshank, and the bittern, have been drained equally with the summer dwellings of the lapwing and the curlew.
As the car jolts along past "Hag's Valley," a dozen curlews take wing, and a little further on the shrill cry of the redshank strikes on the ear.
Wild fowl in great variety visit the island, and the low-lying land within the sea-wall is the favourite haunt of many sea-birds; and several varieties of plover, the redshank, greenshank, sandpiper, and snipe may be found there.
Eggs, on the other hand, like those of the house sparrow, redshank and some of the smaller warblers, are so easily confused with those of allied species that Lord Lilford's caution is by no means superfluous.
Kearton somewhere relates how he once induced a blackbird to sit on the eggs of a thrush, and a lapwing on those of a redshank.