Larks | Alaudidae

Leeuweriken | Alondras | Larks

Ground birds in brown and sand, streaked all over and built to walk rather than hop: the hind claw is long and almost straight, and the back of the tarsus carries a row of separate scales instead of the smooth plate other songbirds have there. Almost all species sing on the wing, climbing or hovering, sometimes for minutes on end above ground that offers no song post. The nest is a scrape on bare soil lined with grass, and the chicks walk away from it before they can fly, which limits losses when the field is cut. Bills range from short and heavy for seed to long and curved for digging in the soil. In the region covered by this guide only the Horned Lark occurs, as an isolated population in the grasslands of the high plateau around Bogotá in Colombia, far from the other populations in North America.