Steppe chicken
| Steppe chicken | ||||||||||||
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Steppe chicken, left and right ♂♂, in the middle ♀ |
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| Syrrhaptes paradoxus | ||||||||||||
| ( Pallas , 1773) |
The sand grouse or prairie Ortega ( Syrrhaptes paradoxus ) is a bird from the family of grouse .
description
The bird, which is 30 to 41 centimeters tall, is characterized by long, needle-shaped, pointed, medium-sized tail feathers. These are even longer than the skewered and brown-bellied fruit flies . The 10th swing arm is also drawn out in a spike shape, but this is of no importance in field ornithological terms. Presumably this feature is responsible for the whistling flight noise. The steppe chicken has a conspicuous black field on its belly, which is smaller than that of the sand flight chicken and is limited to a band around the feet. The undersides of the wings are light.
In the male, the head, neck and chest are light and without any noticeable dark markings. The throat is orange-yellow like a strip of arches leading from the eye to the sides of the neck. On the chest there is an inconspicuous, dark dashed transverse band - in contrast to other fruit flies. The sand-colored top is banded. On the upper side of the wings there is no white, chest and hand wings are light gray in color. In the female, the neck patch is lined with a narrow black band. The crown and nape of the head are spotted black and without an orange-yellow.
Occurrence
The steppe grouse lives in sandy semi-deserts in Central Asia. It occurs approximately between 40 ° N and 50 ° N from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan east to northeast China. During the migrations to Europe it appears preferentially on sandy coasts and on stubble fields. In Great Britain and Denmark there were even broods, in Northern Germany breeding attempts took place in the year of the invasion of 1888. The last major invasions to Europe with over 10,000 birds occurred in 1863, 1888 and, to a lesser extent, in 1908. Since then the steppe grouse has only appeared sporadically in Europe. The reason is probably the loss of the breeding areas in western Central Asia due to the intensification of agriculture there.
Way of life
United in flocks, the birds often call “körki” or “körkörki”. The steppe chicken feeds mainly on vegetable food, especially seeds, grasses and herbs, rarely on insects. The mating season usually begins from March or April. The steppe grouse nests in smaller colonies on the ground in dense vegetation. The clutch usually consists of three, rarely four ocher-colored eggs.
literature
- Roger Peterson, Guy Montfort, FAD Hollom: The Birds of Europe. 9th edition. Paul Parey, Hamburg / Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-490-05518-7 .
- Christopher M. Perrins : The Great Encyclopedia of Birds. Orbis Verlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-572-00702-X (special edition).
- UN Glutz von Blotzheim, KM Bauer : Handbook of the birds of Central Europe. (HBV). Volume 7: Charadriiformes. Part 2: snipe, seagull and alken birds. AULA-Verlag, ISBN 3-923527-00-4 .
- Alfred Brehm : The steppe chicken. A request to all German hunters . In: The Gazebo . Issue 46, 1863, pp. 726-727 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).
Web links
- Syrrhaptes paradoxus in the Red List of Threatened Species of the IUCN 2008. Posted by: BirdLife International, 2008. Accessed on March 2 of 2009.
- Videos, photos and sound recordings on Syrrhaptes paradoxus in the Internet Bird Collection
- Feathers of the steppe grouse