Wedge-tailed plover
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Wedge-tailed plover ( Charadrius vociferus ) |
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| Charadrius vociferus | ||||||||||
| Linnaeus , 1758 |
The killdeer ( Charadrius vociferus ) is an American bird species from the family of Plover (Charadriidae). In Europe, the wedge-tailed plover is a rare wanderer . It is occasionally drifted to the east Atlantic coasts by autumn and winter storms.
features
The 26 cm long wedge-tailed plover is gray-brown on the top with a red-orange rump. The underside and the neck are white. The bird has a double black chest band. It has a long, wedge-shaped tail and long, pointed wings. The rump is red-brown. The wide white wing band is visible in flying wedge-tailed plovers. Fledglings are similar to adult birds, but have less pronounced black facial markings and an incomplete upper chest band.
He owes his English name Killdeer to his loud kill-dier calls .
Habitat, Distribution, and Migration
The wedge-tailed plover is one of the most common plover species in America. It occurs in North , Central and Northern South America . The northern populations migrate south to overwinter while the southern populations do not migrate. The bird seldom turns up as a wanderer as a result of winter storms in Western Europe .
The wedge-tailed plover's migrations are complex and have so far been little studied. The northward migration begins between February and March, sometimes not until mid-April. The southward hike takes place between June and November. Studies of ringed wedge-tailed plovers have shown that at the end of the breeding season the animals migrate from Indiana and Wisconsin to Louisiana and South Carolina , from New York to Georgia , from Alberta to Kansas , and from Pennsylvania to Florida . The train to South America mainly goes through the Greater Antilles , Mexico and Central America. By observing ringed individuals, it turned out that the animals often return to the same locations over several years.
Although strictly speaking it belongs to the coastal birds, the wedge-tailed plover is also found inland. The species prefers open areas, in particular sandbanks, silt and pastures, as well as areas shaped by humans such as sports fields, airports, golf courses, gravel parking lots or house roofs covered with gravel. However, wedge-tailed plovers are most commonly found near water, even if they are lawn sprinklers.
Reproduction
The wedge-tailed plover usually lays four eggs in a shallow depression, which both parent birds incubate for around four weeks. The young birds flee from their nests, they already have down feathers and open eyes when they hatch and can run and eat after just a few hours. However, they are still dependent on their parents until they fledged.
When there is danger to the nest and thus the offspring, wedge-tailed plovers try to lure potential attackers away from the nest by pretending that their wings are damaged. The biologist Dianne H. Brunton investigated this behavior in more detail in 1984 and 1985 and found that wedge-tailed plovers show this typical behavior after the chicks hatch more often than during the incubation or later when the young are already more on their own. She also found that predators living on the ground were more likely to be distracted by the behavior of their parent animals than those who attacked the chicks from the air. It was also found that male wedge-tailed plovers showed the behavior more frequently, while female animals were more likely to leave the nest by fleeing. Brunton concluded from this that in the case of wedge-tailed plovers as ground-breeders, the focus is on the ability of females to lay new eggs due to the high losses of clutches and young animals. Furthermore, she put forward the thesis that the defense behavior of the individual individuals is influenced less by how much the wedge-tailed plovers have already invested in their current brood, and more by how much the eggs or young are dependent on the protection of the parent animals.
literature
- Bette J. Jackson / Jerome A. Jackson: Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus), version 2.0. , in: Birds of North America Online (PG Rodewald, editor), Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, 2000, doi: 10.2173 / bna.517 (paid access ; accessed March 10, 2018)
- Peter Colston / Philip Burton: Limicolen - All European wader species, identifiers, flight images, biology, distribution. BlV Verlagsgesellschaft, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-405-13647-4
Web links
- Videos, photos and sound recordings for Charadrius vociferus in the Internet Bird Collection
- Charadrius vociferus inthe IUCN 2013 Red List of Threatened Species . Listed by: BirdLife International, 2012. Retrieved December 7, 2013.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans-Günther Bauer, Einhard Bezzel and Wolfgang Fiedler (eds.): The compendium of birds in Central Europe: Everything about biology, endangerment and protection. Volume 1: Nonpasseriformes - non-sparrow birds , Aula-Verlag Wiebelsheim, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-89104-647-2 , p. 448.
- ↑ On this and the following cf. Jackson / Jackson, Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) , section "Distribution, Migration and Habitat", in: Birds of North America Online 2000 (accessed March 10, 2018)
- ↑ Dianne H. Brunton, The Effects of Nesting Stage, Sex, and Type of Predator on Parental Defense by Killdeer (Charadrius vociferous): Testing Models of Avian Parental Defense , in: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 26, 3 (1990), pp. 181-190.
- ^ Brunton, The Effects of Nesting Stage, Sex, and Type of Predator on Parental Defense by Killdeer , p. 188.
- ^ Brunton, The Effects of Nesting Stage, Sex, and Type of Predator on Parental Defense by Killdeer , p. 187.
- ^ Brunton, The Effects of Nesting Stage, Sex, and Type of Predator on Parental Defense by Killdeer , p. 185.
- ^ Brunton, The Effects of Nesting Stage, Sex, and Type of Predator on Parental Defense by Killdeer , p. 189.
- ↑ "I suggest that patterns of parental defense by killdeer provide further support for the idea that an individual's decision to continue investing in an offspring does not depend upon how much has already been invested, rather, the level of defense correlates most strongly with the vulnerability of the offspring to predation, "Brunton, The Effects of Nesting Stage, Sex, and Type of Predator on Parental Defense by Killdeer , p. 189.