There are three major families of shorebirds: 1  Waders, about 220 species, include sandpipers, lapwings, snipes, plovers, stilts and various other species. These birds inhabit coasts and shorelines, as well as other open habitats. 2  Gulls, terns, skuas, jaegers and skimmers form a group of a little over 100 species.
The compass was probably invented in the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC) by Chinese fortune-tellers who used the lodestones to construct their fortune telling boards.
Evidence suggests that the magnetic compass was invented in China between 221 and 206 B.C. The earliest compasses were not used for navigation, but for fortune-telling. Chinese compasses became navigational orienteering devices between 1040 and 1044 A.D. and were used as maritime navigational devices by 1117 A.D.