faeder
faeder noun: a male ruff (bird, Philomachus pugnax, syn. Calidris pugnax) that permanently mimics a female so as to gain access to mating territories and "steal" matings.
Noun
faeder (plural faeders)
- A male ruff (bird, Philomachus pugnax, syn. Calidris pugnax) that permanently mimics a female so as to gain access to mating territories and "steal" matings.
- Here, we describe a rare female-like morph of ruffs: the ‘missing’ third alternative mating strategy, which we have called ‘faeder’. Faeders are slightly larger than females and in late April have testes 2.5 time the size of testes of normal males.2006 June 22, Joop Jukema, “Permanent female mimics in a lekking shorebird”, in Biology Letters
- Faeders, male ruffs that mimic females in plumage and "sneak" copulations at leks, secrete monoesters like other males.2007, Jeroen Willem Hendrik Reneerkens, Functional aspects of seasonal variation in preen wax composition of sandpipers (Scolopacidae), page 49
Examples of faeder in a sentence
- It has recently been discovered that a third mating strategy exists for males - the 'faeder' or 'sneaker', which number only about 1% of the Ruff population.2009, Richard J. Chandler, Shorebirds of North America, Europe, and Asia: A Photographic Guide:
- These “faeder” males, as they are called, were found to have testes 2.5 times larger than those of normal males during the peak breeding time of late April and are delightfully termed “sneakers.”2016, Clifford B. Frith, Charles Darwin's Life With Birds: His Complete Ornithology:
Forms of faeder
| plural | faeders |
|---|---|
| alternative form | fæder |
Origin of faeder
Learned borrowing from Old English fæder (“father”). Doublet of ayr, father, padre, pater, and père.
Questions about faeder
- What does faeder mean?
- Faeder means a male ruff (bird, Philomachus pugnax, syn. Calidris pugnax) that permanently mimics a female so as to gain access to mating territories and "steal" matings.
- How do you use faeder in a sentence?
- It has recently been discovered that a third mating strategy exists for males - the 'faeder' or 'sneaker', which number only about 1% of the Ruff population.
- What part of speech is faeder?
- Faeder is a noun.
- What is the plural of faeder?
- The plural of faeder is faeders.
Words near faeder in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: faeder (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “faeder.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/faeder. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.