Eurasian thick-knee | Burhinus oedicnemus

Voice

The key to the species. From about half an hour after sunset comes a plaintive, drawn-out, rising coor-leee, genuinely curlew-like but sharper and more strident and falling away at the end. Birds answer one another and build the calling into a chorus that can run for half an hour, the tempo quickening and the notes growing shorter and hoarser, kwee-kwee-kwee. When alarmed, a short hard kik-kik-kik. On a still night the sound carries close to a kilometre across open ground, and in the dark it is almost always the only way the species is recorded.

Identification

Coarsely streaked sandy brown, with a long thick neck and a heavy rounded head. The eye is large and staring yellow, set off by a white supercilium and a white line below the cheek stripe; the bill is yellow with a black tip and the legs are thick and greenish yellow with a conspicuously swollen joint. A black-white-black bar crosses the greater coverts on the closed wing. In flight the black primaries carry two white patches and the bird looks broad-winged and slow, more like a small raptor than a wader.

Confusion species

In Europe there is little to confuse it with. A crouching bird is far more often overlooked than misidentified: it flattens itself, stretches the neck along the ground and merges completely into stones and stubble. In flight the black and white wing pattern can suggest a large plover, but the slow beat, the long neck and the projecting legs rule that out. In North Africa and the Middle East the smaller Senegal thick-knee overlaps, with a longer bill that is mostly black with a yellow base, a plain grey panel on the greater coverts and one white primary patch instead of two. In the dark the call is most often put down to a Curlew.

Habitat

Open, dry and thinly vegetated ground on stony or gravelly soils: dry grassland, fallow and stubble, chalk grassland, river shingle, sandy heaths and young dunes, and in southern Europe also olive groves, vineyards and open dehesa. It needs short or absent vegetation to walk in and nests in a scrape on bare ground.

Range and movements

Breeds across southern and central Europe, North Africa and the Levant, with northern outposts in England (the Brecks, Wessex, East Anglia) and northern France; lost as a breeder in the Low Countries. Iberia holds by far the largest population, several tens of thousands of pairs from Extremadura and Castile to the Ebro valley, Andalusia and the Mediterranean coast, plus its own subspecies on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. Northern breeders winter in Iberia and North Africa.

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

How and when to look

After sunset, park on the edge of an open stony plain, switch the engine off and listen; driving around achieves nothing, sitting still does. The steppes of Extremadura and La Mancha are first-rate ground, and on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote the birds are far less wary. In September and October flocks of several dozen gather on fallow and stubble, and that is the best chance of daylight views: scan the bare ground from a slight rise and look for the yellow eyes. Do not put a lamp on the birds.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened but declining across much of Europe. Losses come from the disappearance of fallow, earlier and more frequent mowing, conversion of dry grassland to irrigated crops, infrastructure, and disturbance by dogs and off-road vehicles. Against that trend, targeted nest protection on English farmland has produced a steady recovery since the 1980s.

Scientific name

Burhinus oedicnemus | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Charadrius oedicnemus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Burhinus was introduced in 1811 by Illiger. Burhinus is Greek, from bous 'ox' and rhis 'nose', after the heavy, broad base of the bill. oedicnemus is Greek, from oideō 'to swell' and knēmē 'shin', after the prominent joints of the legs. The specimen the first description was based on came from England.