All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Pratincoles and coursers › Oriental pratincole
Oriental pratincole
Glareola maldivarum | Oosterse vorkstaartplevier | Canastera oriental
The eastern counterpart of Collared Pratincole and the hardest of the three to pin down. It hawks insects like an oversized swallow over wet ground, on long pointed wings, then drops onto bare mud and sits so low that it disappears.
Voice
A hard tern-like chik-chik and a rattling kirri-kirri, almost always in flight and often in chorus as a party lifts off. Drier and sharper than Collared Pratincole, but the margin is too narrow to identify a bird on voice alone.
No freely licensed recording is available for this species yet.
Identification
Olive-brown above, white below, with a warm orange wash across the lower breast that fades onto the flanks. The throat is a rich buff-ochre, neatly ringed by a narrow black border, and the bill is black with a red base. Rump white, tail black and only shallowly forked. The critical structural point at rest is that the wing tips project clearly beyond the tail tip. In flight the underwing coverts are chestnut and there is no white trailing edge to the secondaries.
Confusion species
Against Collared Pratincole the differences are tail length and trailing edge: on that species the tail streamers reach or exceed the wing tips and the secondaries show a clean white trailing edge, which Oriental lacks. The chestnut underwing is shared and so settles nothing between those two. Against Black-winged Pratincole the underwing is the decider, black on that species and chestnut on Oriental, while both lack the white trailing edge. The throat border also helps: Oriental has an orange-ochre throat inside a narrow, crisply drawn black line, Collared a creamier yellow throat with a finer border, and Black-winged a paler throat with a heavier border and no white eye-ring.
Habitat
Breeds on bare, drying ground: saline steppe, receding lake shores, river beds and fallow fields, always with open sightlines and next to no vegetation. Outside the breeding season it hunts over ricefields, wet grassland and tidal flats, often in enormous flocks following insect swarms. Birds reaching Europe are usually found on a bare, wet field margin or a freshly ploughed field beside water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds from Pakistan and northern India east through China to Manchuria and the Philippines, and winters in South-East Asia and northern Australia. Its true abundance became clear in February 2004, when more than two and a half million were counted at Eighty Mile Beach in Western Australia. All British records are coastal and southern or eastern: Suffolk in June 1981 was the first, followed by birds in Essex, Kent, Norfolk, Sussex and Lincolnshire.
Where and when to look
Several British records have involved long-staying, wide-ranging birds that shuttled between reserves for weeks, so a pratincole that appears settled is worth returning to for flight views in good light. The one photograph that matters is of the open underwing: chestnut or black, taken from below with the secondaries sharp. A second image of the perched bird, showing wing tips against tail tip, then separates Oriental from Collared.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened, with a population in the millions, but the trend is downward. The main pressures are the conversion of seasonal wetlands and drying lake shores to intensive agriculture, and insecticide use across the wintering range, where the birds live almost entirely on flying insects.