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American golden-plover | Pluvialis dominica
Amerikaanse goudplevier | Chorlito dorado americano
The Nearctic counterpart of the golden plover, and the American wader most often picked out of a European Golden Plover flock — usually on shape and stance, before a single feather has been checked. Ireland and western Britain take the great majority of records; elsewhere in the map area it turns up chiefly on the Azores and along the Atlantic coast of Galicia and Cantabria, mostly in late summer and autumn. Further east, as in the Low Countries, it is a handful of records a year, almost always a juvenile standing among hundreds of its European counterpart on an arable field.
Voice
A flat, slightly harsh kleep or drawn-out queedle, lower and more clipped than the clear, plaintive tloo of European Golden Plover and without the rising second note of Pacific Golden-Plover. Vagrants call mainly on taking off with the flock.
Recording: Doug Hynes — CC BY-SA 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
Smaller and slimmer than European Golden Plover, longer-legged and with a noticeably long rear end. Breeding adults are black from chin to undertail, the black unbroken along the flanks, with a broad white band running from the forehead over the eye and down the side of the neck, ending in a square block on the breast side. The upperparts are spangled white and pale buff rather than deep gold. Juveniles and winter birds are cold grey-brown with a bold whitish supercilium, a dark cap and a plain grey wash across the breast. At rest four or five primary tips fall beyond the short tertials and the wingtip projects well past the tail.
Confusion species
The axillaries settle it. European Golden Plover has pure white axillaries and a white underwing; American Golden-Plover has smoky grey axillaries; Pacific Golden-Plover grey-brown ones. In flight, against the light, that patch under the wing is the one character that never lies, and a resting bird with the wings folded often cannot be named at all until it lifts them. Against Pacific Golden-Plover, this species has the longer primary projection, with four or five primary tips clear of the tertials and the wingtip standing well beyond the tail; Pacific shows two or three tips and a wingtip roughly level with the tail. Pacific has short-looking wings because its tertials are long, almost reaching the wingtip, while on American the tertials are short and the wing looks stretched. Pacific is longer in the tibia and stands higher on the leg; American looks bigger-headed, with a steeper forehead and a bolder supercilium. In breeding plumage American is solidly black to the undertail, while Pacific shows white mottling along the flanks and vent and a white neck stripe that continues down the flank instead of stopping at the breast. Against European Golden Plover, both American species are slimmer, greyer and longer-legged, and neither shows the white axillary flash.
Habitat
Short coastal grassland is the classic setting: machair, cropped pasture, golf links and airfields, with stubbles and ploughed fields inland. Birds roost on estuarine mud and saltmarsh and feed on the grass, and they are almost always inside a flock of European Golden Plovers and Lapwings rather than alone.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds on Arctic tundra from western Alaska across northern Canada and winters on the grasslands of southern South America. Inside the map area Ireland is by far the stronghold, then the Hebrides, western Scotland and the Azores: near-annual, chiefly from late August to early November, mostly juveniles. Eastwards and southwards quickly scarcer: a handful a year on the North Sea coast, a rarity in Iberia, mainly from September to November in Galicia, Asturias, the Ebro delta and the Guadalquivir marshes.
How and when to look
From late September to mid-October, after a run of Atlantic lows, find the big golden plover flocks — coastal grassland in western Ireland and the Hebrides, saltmarshes and polders along the North Sea, marshes and cereal plains in Iberia — and work through them row by row with the scope. Look at posture first: the bird you want stands taller, looks greyer and has a longer wingtip. Then wait for the flock to fly; the grey armpit against all that white settles the record in a second.
Conservation status
Not of conservation concern, with a large and apparently stable population across the Arctic. The main pressures fall on migration, where the species depends on a small number of grassland and wetland staging areas in the Great Plains and in South America that are steadily being ploughed or drained.
Scientific name
Pluvialis dominica | (Müller, 1776)
Müller described the species in 1776 as Charadrius dominicius; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Pluvialis was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Pluvialis is Latin for 'relating to rain', from pluvia 'rain', from the old belief that these plovers flocked when rain was imminent. dominica refers to Santo Domingo, the island now called Hispaniola, in the West Indies. The specimen the first description was based on came from Hispaniola.