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Pied Avocet
Recurvirostra avosetta | Kluut | Avoceta común
The Avocet is one of Europe's most elegant waders: snow white and black on long blue-grey legs. Its fine upturned bill sweeps sideways through soft mud and shallow water in search of small crustaceans.
Voice
A clear, slightly plaintive kluut kluut — the Dutch name is a rendering of the call. Disturbance at a colony turns it into a persistent, nervous yelping, usually in chorus. Heard from March to July; largely silent outside the breeding season.
Recording: Ryan Hodnett — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Unmistakable white with a black crown and hindneck and bold black bands across the wing and scapulars. The black bill is long, fine and clearly upcurved, shorter and more strongly curved in females. Long blue-grey legs project well beyond the tail in flight. Juveniles show brown-black rather than jet-black markings.
Confusion species
No real lookalike, but distant birds are confused with Black-winged Stilt, which has a black back and wings, a dead straight bill and bright pink-red legs. On flooded fields small parties also get called Black-headed Gulls. The upturned bill and the scything feeding action settle it at once.
Habitat
Shallow brackish and salt water over soft mud: saltmarsh, brackish pools, mudflats, salinas, dredged spoil and newly created wetlands. Nests colonially on bare or sparsely vegetated islets and shores free of ground predators.
Range and movements
Breeds along north-west European coasts and at inland saline sites from Iberia to Central Asia. The Netherlands holds an important share of the north-west European breeders; these winter on French and Iberian coasts, where the salinas of Cádiz, the Ebro Delta and Doñana hold big concentrations.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- Migration direction
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
April and May in the Dutch Delta or Wadden area on a falling tide, when breeding birds sweep across freshly exposed mud; Texel, Saeftinghe and the Oostvaardersplassen are the classics. In winter, Andalusia: the salt pans near Cádiz and the Marismas del Odiel in low morning light.
Conservation status
Increased strongly through the twentieth century thanks to protection and to newly created bare, wet pioneer habitat, but is now under pressure as those sites become overgrown, from predation by foxes and gulls, and from nests flooded by summer storms. Globally not threatened.