Black-bellied sandgrouse | Pterocles orientalis

Voice

The flight call is a low, rolling, slightly guttural churrr-re-ka, dropping a little at the end, with a growling undertone often likened to a horse snorting at a distance. Birds call less continuously than Pin-tailed and with longer gaps, but the sound carries a long way over bare ground and is usually all you get from a flock passing high overhead.

Identification

Heavily built, with a short pointed tail and no elongated feathers. The male has a blue-grey head and neck, an orange throat patch, a thin black line across the lower breast and ochre scapulars marked with black drops. The female is densely spotted and streaked black above and shares the orange throat. Both sexes have a black belly and white underwing coverts, which give the decisive flight view: a white inner wing pinched between black flight feathers and a black belly.

Confusion species

Pin-tailed sandgrouse is the only real pitfall, and as the birds are almost always seen passing overhead it comes down to belly, tail, underwing and voice. The belly here is black and cuts the underside sharply in two, whereas Pin-tailed is almost wholly white below. The tail is short and pointed, without the needle-like streamers of Pin-tailed. Both show white underwing coverts, but here the white is trapped between black remiges and a black belly and reads as a narrow pale wedge. The call is the safest character: low, rolling and growling against the high dry rattle of Pin-tailed. Black-bellied is also larger, broader-winged and slower in the beat, more partridge than plover.

Habitat

Bare, stony country: high windswept plateaux, gravelly plains with open patches, extensive dry-farmed cereal, fallow and saline flats. The species tolerates more stone, more relief and greater altitude than Pin-tailed and is more often found on coarse, thinly vegetated ground. It too gathers at water early in the morning, and the male soaks his belly feathers there and flies the water back to the chicks.

Range and movements

In Europe essentially confined to Spain and Portugal, with most birds in Castilla y León, Aragón, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura, smaller centres in Navarra, La Rioja, Murcia, Madrid and Andalusia, and a further population on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. Eastwards it breeds in Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia, and southwards across North Africa. It is not a bird to expect anywhere in north-west Europe, and it has never strayed to the Netherlands.

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

How and when to look

Work the higher, stonier margins of the steppe rather than the flat cereal — the páramos of Belchite and Los Monegros, the high plains of Castile, La Serena and the plains of Villafáfila. Stand on a rise overlooking the plain at first light and listen: the low rolling call betrays flocks that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Winter flocks are larger and more settled, which improves the chances of a view on the ground. On Fuerteventura, on the Tindaya plain and around the Los Molinos reservoir, the birds are far tamer and can be seen close to.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, but in steep decline in Spain, where an estimated 8,500 to 13,500 birds remain, one of the sharpest falls among Spanish steppe birds. Intensification and irrigation of dry farmland, the disappearance of fallow, solar developments on old steppe and the drying out of drinking pools are the main causes.

Scientific name

Pterocles orientalis | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Tetrao orientalis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Pterocles was introduced in 1815 by Temminck. Pterocles is Greek, from pteron 'wing' and -klēs 'notable, splendid'. orientalis is Latin for 'eastern', after the eastern part of the range. The specimen the first description was based on came from Anatolia.