Plovers and lapwings | Charadriidae

Plevieren | Chorlitos y avefrías | Plovers and lapwings

Eighteen species in eight genera occur in this guide. Compact birds with a large head, short neck and a short bill thickened towards the tip, made for picking prey from the surface rather than probing into the ground. They feed with a characteristic run, stop and peck pattern, also in the dark, and some species patter one foot on wet ground to bring prey to the surface. Black bands across breast and head break up the outline on bare ground. The clutch usually consists of three or four pear-shaped eggs in a scrape on bare sand, gravel or short-grazed grassland; when danger threatens the parents lead an intruder away with a feigned broken wing. Some species are resident here: the Andean Lapwing on wet grassland and marshes of páramo and puna, the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover in high Andean bogs, the plovers of the sandy beaches and salt flats along the Pacific coast, the Pied Lapwing on sandbars along the rivers of the Amazonian lowlands, and the Southern Lapwing, which carries a sharp spur at the bend of the wing and noisily attacks anyone who approaches its nest. Others are migrants from the far north that winter here or pass through, with long, pointed wings for the flight from the tundra.