The Wood Sandpiper in all plumages is slimmer, leggier and more elegant than most other sandpipers, more like a small Redshank. They also have beautifully spangled upper-parts and an obvious pale super-cilium. In flight Wood Sandpipers show a neat, square white rump but they look brown and white not black and white and their underwings are pale.

They breed in marshes and peat bogs and on passages beside freshwater lagoons, lakes and marshes. A few pairs breed in Scotland. One of the most common breeding waders of Scandinavia, they occur as passage migrants at many of the wetlands of central and southern Europe 'en route' to their wintering areas in Africa. The European population is between 300-400,000 pairs, with the majority of these in Finland.