The Wandering Tattler has heavily barred gray-and-white underparts in breeding plumage and a plain gray chest outside the breeding season. It breeds beside northern rivers and moves to rocky Pacific shores and islands.
Breeding adults have dark gray upperparts and heavily barred gray-and-white underparts. Nonbreeding adults and juveniles are dark gray above, with an unmarked gray chest and flanks. All plumages show a pale line over the eye and yellow legs.
It searches for aquatic invertebrates and insects along breeding streams and rocky shores, then uses rocky intertidal coasts and coral reefs outside the breeding season, bobbing its tail as it walks.
It lines ground hollows among stones or low vegetation with twigs, leaves and lichen. Eggs are pale green, grey or olive with brown blotches near the broad end. Downy chicks feed themselves.
Both sexes share incubation and chick care. Females leave before the young fledge, after which males continue caring for them.
It searches visually, turns leaves or algae and probes mud or sand. It may beat large prey against rocks before swallowing, and also eats small fish.
In flight the upperwings are uniformly grey without white wing-stripes, and the rump is dark.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.