By BILL CHAISSON
When I was a little kid living on Long Island, we didn’t spend a lot of time at the beach. And when we did go to the beach it was almost always in the summer, so I didn’t become familiar with shorebirds until I was an adult. From the age of 9 I lived inland, so the first plover that I met was the killdeer. It is possible that the first ones I ever saw were actually here on a farm in Danbury. (It is certainly where I heard my first whip-poor-wills, but that is a whole other column.)
In writing about woodcocks last week I mentioned that other shorebirds had evolved to take advantage of inland and upland habitats. Some, like the woodcock, snipe, and upland sandpiper, are quite particular about habitat and suffer accordingly as land uses change around them. The narrowness of their ecology is reflected in the singularity of their taxonomic designation. Those three birds are the only members of their genus found in North America. In contrast, in addition to the Killdeer, there are five other members of the genus Charadrius on this continent.
Killdeers require open spaces, but they are not very fussy about what form they take. The first ones I remember seeing were living on pastures grazed by horses and cows and strewn with the usual boulders that characterize a New England open space. At home in the Hudson Valley the pair with which I was familiar lived on an abandoned landfill that stuck out from the shore of the Hudson River. They also accept golf courses, malls with elaborate landscaping, and less heavily used city parks as acceptable breeding and feeding grounds.
In contrast, the upland sandpiper requires if not undisturbed, then little disturbed native grasslands in order to carry on. In areas were grasslands are converted to cropland, the bird’s populations have declined. Wilson’s snipe requires wetlands to breed and forage, so in regions where those are drained or developed, they decline as well. However, both of these shorebirds are also game birds, so conserving them has attracted attention and resources and their overall numbers have remained stable since the 1960s.
The killdeer is not a game bird, although it was undoubtedly shot along with other migrating shorebirds before the passage of the Migratory Bird Treat Act of 1918. Shooting and habitat loss is not why killdeer numbers have declined. It is the killdeers very adaptability that is hurting it. Because they accommodate themselves readily to human-modified landscapes like golf courses, malls, and suburban lawns, killdeer populations have declined because of exposure to pesticides and collisions with cars and buildings. According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, their numbers declined by 46 percent between 1966 and 2014. However, they are not endangered by any means; their population was estimated 2 million birds in 2012.
At 10.5 inches long, killdeers are large compared to other members of their genus, which range between 6.25 inches (snowy plover) and 7.75 inches (Wilson’s plover). This means they are the same size as the Pluvialis plovers, a group that includes four similar species, the best known of which is the golden plover, which we see only in migration. It breeds only on the Arctic tundra, while the killdeer breeds pretty much everywhere else on the continent and down into the Caribbean islands and Central America.
In a sense the killdeer is like an overgrown, sharper dressed robin. The bird has a brown back the color of wet sand, a snowy white belly and chest, two bold black bands across the upper chest, and a black, white, and brown patterned head set off by a large light brown eye. Like the robin, it is constantly foraging in open spaces where you can watch it, but unlike the hopping thrush, the plover scampers, its legs a blur of motion while its body seems to float along. Robins and killdeer have the same dietary focus: invertebrates, including earthworms and all manner of insects and their larvae.
The nesting habits of robins and killdeers are quite different. Whereas robins have the tendency to nest on your front porch and then harass you when you try to use the porch too, killdeers nest on the ground and rather then try to drive you away, they engage in an elaborate ruse. If you approach a killdeer nest, one of the birds will appear to stumble toward you, dragging a wing on the ground and uttering pathetic cries. This is a display that evolved to draw four-footed predators away from the nest, so if you go toward the bird it will move in a direction away from its eggs.
If you are merely a curious two-footed birdwatcher and amble in a direction that happens to be toward the nest, then the bird will suddenly “recover,” fly to a place between you and the nest, and do the whole thing all over again. As a kid I played “hot and cold” with a bird and did manage to find the nest. This was unwise and unkind of me. For one thing the bird wasted a lot of time and energy attempting to distract me. Furthermore, any crow or other savvy predator that happened to watching the whole charade might then have raided the nest upon my departure. So, if you so see this display, don’t prolong it, however entertaining in might seem.
The birds plumage is part of the distraction in this display. The bases of the primary and secondary feathers are white and as part of the wounded act, the bird splays them dramatically. The tail is also important. When the wings are out, the rump is revealed to be a bright rufous color and there is a sharp black terminal band on the tail itself. These feature are visible when the bird is in flight, but when it is on the ground and contorting itself to appear stricken, they serve to draw the attention of the intruder.
Another part of the display is a plaintive trill (“trrrrrr”) that is associated with distress in general. But of course the killdeer is, like the chickadee and the phoebe, one of those birds named for its own call. This distinctive sound is often uttered in flight. Like New Englanders, the killdeer usually drops the ‘r’ and the call sounds like “kill-deeah” or just “dee, dee, dee.” Even its Latin name take note of its noisiness: Charadrius vociferus.
The killdeers are back locally. A friend told me that she has heard and seen them at the Sullivan County complex in Unity. I thought I heard one over my house in Unity Center, but when I looked up it was a kestrel, calling “kill-EE, kill-EE, Kill-EE.”
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