Detecting coherent signals of climate change is best achieved by conducting expansive, long‐term studies. Here, using counts of waders ( Charadrii ) collected from ca. 3500 sites over 30 years and covering a major portion of western Europe, we present the largest‐scale study to show that faunal abundance is influenced by climate in winter. We demonstrate that the ‘weighted centroids’ of populations of seven species of wader oc...