Black-Winged Pratincole | Glareola nordmanni

Voice

A dry, hard kik-kik and a rattling kirrik, usually in flight and often from small parties. It is close enough to Collared Pratincole to be useless as an identification character; treat it only as the cue to get onto the bird.

Identification

Darker and warmer brown above than Collared Pratincole, with a cream throat inside a black border and a red bill base. The legs are long and black, and the white eye-ring is absent or barely visible. The tail is deeply forked but the streamers are short and do not project beyond the wing tips on the perched bird. Everything else is a flight character: white rump, black tail, no white trailing edge to the wing, and an entirely black underwing cutting hard against the white belly.

Confusion species

Against Collared Pratincole there are four points, and three of them can only be seen in flight. The underwing is black rather than chestnut; the thin but clear white trailing edge along the secondaries of Collared is absent altogether; and the tail streamers are shorter, so the fork looks shallower and falls short of the wing tips at rest. All three call for a bird in flight, and preferably one seen into the light: backlit, the secondaries glow and the presence or absence of a white trailing edge is instant, while the underwing reads as a solid black panel against the white belly. On a perched bird, or in flat side light, the character is worthless, because chestnut can pass for black. Oriental Pratincole is separated at once by its chestnut underwing, though it shares the lack of a white trailing edge.

Habitat

Breeds colonially on saline steppe, receding lake shores and damp plains with short, heavily grazed vegetation, often near soda lakes and salt pans. It feeds on the wing over grassland and arable, following swarms of locusts and beetles; in southern Africa it tracks the rains and locust outbreaks through the austral summer. Vagrants in north-west Europe usually sit on bare field margins, wet meadows and drying mud.

Range and movements

Breeds from the Pontic steppe east to the eastern Kazakh steppe and south-west Siberia. Effectively the entire world population winters in southern Africa, mainly Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and north-western South Africa, where flocks of over a thousand gather on flooded grassland after heavy rain. In north-west Europe August is by far the best month, with stragglers into November. In the British Isles records are scattered, mainly along the east and south coasts of Great Britain, with the same marked late-summer bias.

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

How and when to look

August is the month, and the birds appear where insects are rising: freshly cut grassland, drying clay pits and the margins of coastal lagoons, or in Iberia the Guadalquivir marshes, the Ebro delta and the La Mancha lagoons, among flocks of Collared Pratincole. Work the light rather than the bird: stand so that a passing pratincole crosses between you and the sun, and wait for a low pass instead of chasing a perched bird. Better ten mediocre flight shots than one fine portrait of the bird standing; also check the long black legs and the absence of a white eye-ring, marks that show best on a standing bird.

Conservation status

Listed as Near Threatened. In the European part of the range numbers have fallen steeply and the species has all but disappeared from the western Pontic steppe since the 1990s, while populations in the central and north-eastern Kazakh steppe are increasing. The critical problem is breeding output: trampling of nests by cattle, predation, hailstorms and drought can remove most of a season's young. Conversion of steppe to arable and the use of pesticides against locusts add to the pressure.

Scientific name

Glareola nordmanni | Fischer von Waldheim, 1842

Fischer von Waldheim described the species in 1842 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Glareola was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Glareola is a Latin diminutive of glarea 'gravel', after the bare gravelly ground where pratincoles nest. nordmanni honours the Finnish-born zoologist and explorer Alexander von Nordmann (1803–1866). The specimen the first description was based on came from the steppes of southern Russia.