[3] This species favors a variety of habitats including tundra in the north to ponds and mudflats in the south.

[5] The short-billed dowitcher was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[6] Gmelin based his description on the "brown snipe" from the coast of New York that had been described in 1785 by the English ornithologist John Latham and by the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant.

The three subspecies have slight variations in appearance: None of these combines the reddish belly and barred flanks of the breeding plumage long-billed dowitcher.

[13] The call of this bird is more mellow than that of the long-billed dowitcher, and is useful in identification, particularly of the difficult adult plumages.

The breeding habitat of the short-billed dowitcher includes bogs, tidal marshes, mudflats or forest clearings south of the tree line in northern North America.

Parental roles are not well known, but it is believed the female departs and leaves the male to tend the chicks, which find all their own food.