Waders, gulls and terns | Charadriiformes

Families in this order

• Plovers and allies | CharadriiLarge eyes are the mark of the group: these birds find their food by sight and take it from the surface, which gives them their stop-start gait - run, halt, peck, run again. Bills vary widely within the group, from short and blunt to long and chisel-shaped, but the foot is the same throughout: three toes forward and a hind toe that is small or missing. The chicks are only guarded and brooded; from their first day they gather their own food. Anyone who comes too close to the nest is led away by a parent that stumbles ahead of him calling loudly, as though its wing were broken.
• Thick-knees and stone-curlews | Burhinidae2 species
• Stilts and avocets | Recurvirostridae4 species
• Oystercatchers | Haematopodidae5 species
• Plovers and lapwings | Charadriidae19 species
• Sandpipers and snipes | ScolopaciA long bill with pressure sensors in the tip: these birds locate their prey by touch, deep in mud or damp ground and without ever seeing it, so they feed as well in the dark as by day. The plumage is brown and finely streaked or mottled, and the eyes sit high and far back in the head, so that a probing bird keeps watch above and behind it. Care of the eggs is divided in strikingly different ways within the group: in a number of species the male incubates alone while the female lays in quick succession for several partners. Song in the ordinary sense is usually absent; over the breeding grounds they make sound with their tail or wing feathers, in display flights that can last all night.
• Plains-wanderer | Pedionomidae1 species
• Painted-snipes | Rostratulidae1 species
• Jacanas | Jacanidae1 species
• Sandpipers and allies | Scolopacidae36 species
• Gulls, terns and auks | LariThese waders are not tied to the shoreline: they take their food from or below the water surface, rest afloat on the open sea and hang in the air for hours on long wings - some of them rowing underwater with those same wings. They breed in colonies on cliffs, islets and beaches, with a small clutch that is often no more than one or two eggs. The young stay at the nest and are fed by both parents, in some species long after they can fly; years then pass before they breed themselves, and in the meantime they wear a succession of immature plumages. Not everything in the group fits that picture: genetic evidence also places here a few small, secretive birds of grassland.
• Buttonquails | Turnicidae6 species
• Coursers and pratincoles | Glareolidae2 species
• Jaegers and skuas | Stercorariidae5 species
• Skimmers, noddies, terns and gulls | Laridae30 species