Cream-colored courser | Cursorius cursor

Voice

Usually silent. Disturbed birds give a short sharp whistled kwit-kwit, sometimes repeated in flight. In display the call is a nasal whaur and a harsh frog-like praak-praak that carries a long way over bare ground.

Identification

The whole bird is warm sandy buff, paler on the belly, with a blue-grey rear crown and nape. A black stripe runs back from the eye with a white supercilium above it, and the two meet in a sharp V on the nape. The bill is black and slightly decurved, the legs long and off-white. Perched or walking the bird shows no black at all; the moment it flies, the primaries and the entire underwing are jet black, which is the single most useful confirmation at distance.

Confusion species

At range the shape suggests a plover, but no plover combines long pale legs, a decurved black bill and head stripes meeting in a nape V. Dotterel shares the V but is shorter legged, shows a white breast band and habitually crouches, whereas a courser stands very upright, runs with the head held low and then freezes. Stone-curlew is bulkier and heavier, with a huge yellow eye, bold black-and-white wing bars, a thickened tarsal joint and a stealthy, crouched walk; it is largely crepuscular, while the courser is out running in full sun.

Habitat

Semi-desert and bare steppe: flat, sparsely vegetated ground of sand, grit or stone with at most scattered dwarf shrubs. On the eastern Canaries this means the jables, the wind-blown sand plains, together with the adjoining lava flats. The species avoids closed scrub and irrigated farmland, and feeds on foot with a short dash and a stab at beetles, ants and larvae.

Range and movements

Breeds from the Canary Islands and the Sahara east through Arabia to west Pakistan and north-west India. Within Europe it breeds only on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, with a few birds on La Graciosa and irregular presence on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, and since the turn of the century also in Almería on the Spanish mainland. Further afield it is a real exception: British and Irish records span more than two centuries since the first, from Kent in 1785, typically single birds on coastal grassland, links and cliff-top fields in autumn, though the species has become rarer there.

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

How and when to look

To see the species reliably, book a flight to Fuerteventura and, in the first two hours of daylight, work the plains around Tindaya and the Llanos de la Concepción, or the jable between La Oliva and Lajares, scanning from the car with the sun behind you: at a hundred metres the bird is almost invisible until it moves, and it is usually the movement you see rather than the bird. On Lanzarote, the plain at Sóo, on the edge of El Jable, is the classic address. A vagrant in north-west Europe turns up on short grass rather than mud: expect a golf links, an airfield or a grazed cliff top in autumn, not an estuary.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, but the European population is small and confined. The first national census, in 2005 and 2006, put the Canary Island total at roughly two thousand birds, more than four fifths of them on Fuerteventura. Local pressures are the ones that matter: building and tourist infrastructure on the plains, off-road vehicles crossing the sand sheets, and disturbance by free-running dogs during the breeding season.

Scientific name

Cursorius cursor | (Latham, 1787)

Latham described the species in 1787 as Charadrius cursor; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Cursorius was introduced in 1790 by Latham. Cursorius comes from Latin cursor 'runner', from currere 'to run', after the habit of chasing insects on foot across dry open ground. cursor repeats the sense of the genus name: Latin for 'runner'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Kent, England.