European golden-plover

Voice

A clear, mournful single-note whistle, tloo, that carries surprisingly far across a bare field and usually announces the bird before the eye finds it. In winter, rising flocks call persistently and out of step with one another. Over the breeding grounds the display flight brings a sad, endlessly repeated per-pee-oo.

Identification

Short black bill and a large dark eye in an otherwise plain face. Breeding birds are spangled gold and black above, with black face and belly broadly bordered white in northern birds; southern breeders show only a blotchy black belly. In winter it is spangled golden-buff with a dirty-white belly. In flight, a narrow faint wingbar, no white rump, and a clean white underwing with white axillaries.

Confusion species

Grey Plover is bigger, greyer and heavier-billed and never looks golden. In flight the difference is absolute: Grey Plover shows black axillaries, a white rump and a broad white wingbar, while Golden Plover has an entirely white underwing with no black and a dark rump. Pacific and American Golden Plovers are slimmer and longer-legged, with grey axillaries.

Habitat

Breeds on blanket bog, bare moorland and northern tundra. Outside the breeding season it is tied to open farmland: large grass fields, winter wheat, ploughed land and stubbles, with saltmarsh and mudflats as a fallback in frost or disturbance. It often roosts on the tidal flats and feeds far inland by day.

Range and movements

A breeder of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia and the Russian tundra; as a Dutch breeding bird of the Drenthe bogs it has been lost. In the winter half of the year enormous numbers gather in the northern polders and along the Wadden Sea. Iberia holds large flocks on the dehesas of Extremadura and the cereal plains of Castile.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Drive the open arable of Groningen, Friesland or Flevoland in November and December and look for motionless groups standing like clods in the furrows. Come in the last hour before sunset, when the birds become active and lift noisily. Lapwings do the work for you: where a Lapwing flock stands, Golden Plovers are almost always mixed in.

Conservation status

As a breeder in western Europe it is in decline through drainage, afforestation and bog damage, and it has long since gone as a Dutch breeding bird. As a winter visitor it stays numerous, though mild winters shift the centre of gravity northwards. Arable intensification, fewer winter stubbles and disturbance at roosts all press on numbers.