Senegal Thick-Knee | Burhinus senegalensis

Voice

A clear, piercing whistled series that opens with a few separate notes and then accelerates into a long even run, pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi, rising at first and falling away at the end. Sharper and much faster than the wailing coor-leee of Eurasian Thick-Knee, and it lacks that bird's curlew-like melancholy entirely. Birds on different sandbars answer one another so the sound bounces back and forth across the river. It starts shortly before sunset and continues in bouts through the night; when alarmed, a short hard kik-kik.

Identification

Sandy brown, with the round head, thick neck and staring yellow eye of a thick-knee but smaller and neater throughout. The bill is long and straight and largely black, with a yellow patch only at the base of the upper mandible. A broad white area surrounds the eye, bordered above and below by dark lines. The closed wing carries a plain grey panel, cut off below by a black line and edged with white above. Legs greenish yellow, with the swollen joint that gives the family its English name. In flight the upperwing shows a single broad white bar, and the bird looks broad-winged and slow.

Confusion species

Only Eurasian Thick-Knee comes into question, and in the Nile valley and the southern Levant the two overlap. Three things settle it. Bill: long and largely black with a yellow base here, shorter and largely yellow with a black tip in Eurasian. Wing: a plain grey panel with one black border here, a bold black-white-black bar across the greater coverts in Eurasian, and one white primary patch in flight against two. Size: at 32–38 cm this is clearly smaller and slimmer than Eurasian at 40–44. Habitat settles most cases, since Senegal Thick-Knee is rarely more than a stone's throw from water and Eurasian is a bird of dry ground.

Habitat

Sandbars, gravel and rock islands in large rivers, the margins of lakes and fish ponds, and the bare open ground immediately behind them. It feeds at night on insects and worms on bare soil and farmland, and nests in a scrape on sand, gravel or stone. In the Nile valley it has also become a town bird: flat gravel roofs in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan serve as nest sites, with the river within walking distance.

Range and movements

An African bird by origin, spread in a broad band from West Africa east to north-east Africa. Inside the map area it is the race inornatus that counts, present all year and common throughout the Nile valley from the Delta to Aswan. Recently it has also turned up in the southern Levant, first as singles and then settled at the Ma'ayan Tzvi and Ma'agan Michael fish ponds on the Carmel coast and at Kfar Ruppin in the Bet She'an valley, where records are climbing fast. Further north it remains a vagrant.

• Resident
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

In the Nile valley this is easy: take a felucca out to the rock islands around Elephantine at Aswan, or walk the Luxor corniche in the late afternoon. The southern Levant is harder. Work the fish pond margins at Ma'ayan Tzvi in the last two hours of light, when birds walk out from the roost onto open mud. Trust your ears, because the whistling starts before the birds show themselves, and keep the lamp off.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, and inside the map area it is gaining rather than losing ground. Fish ponds, irrigation canals and flat roofs all suit it, and the colonisation of the southern Levant is new. It does suffer where riverbanks are canalised and revetted, where dams and sand extraction remove the bars it needs, and where free-running dogs and livestock trample nests. It is one of very few birds in this guide whose range inside the map is growing.

Scientific name

Burhinus senegalensis | (Swainson, 1837)

Swainson described the species in 1837 as OEdicnemus senegalensis; 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. senegalensis is New Latin for 'of Senegal', the source of the type material. The specimen the first description was based on came from Senegal.