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Killdeer | Charadrius vociferus
Killdeerplevier | Chorlito gritón
The Killdeer is a large, long-tailed plover with two black breast bands, named after its loud call. Unlike most plovers it often lives far from water, on pastures, fields, airfields and gravel car parks. A distinct resident subspecies, Charadrius vociferus ternominatus, breeds in the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles; in winter birds from North America join it.
Voice
Noisy and heard by day and night: a shrill, repeated kill-dee or dee-ee, and when excited a rapid trilling ti-ti-ti-tirrr. When disturbed near the nest or young it calls incessantly.
Recording: Rory Nefdt — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
20–28 cm, with a long tail. Upperparts plain brown, underparts white, with two black breast bands: a complete band around the neck and a second across the breast. The face shows a white forehead patch, a black band above the forehead and a white stripe behind the eye; the eye-ring is red. The bill is black and the legs flesh-grey. In flight the long, orange-rufous rump and tail base, a broad white wing bar and the dark tail band with white edges are distinctive. Juveniles have pale fringes to the upperpart feathers; downy chicks already show a single breast band.
Confusion species
Semipalmated Plover Charadrius semipalmatus and Wilson's Plover Anarhynchus wilsonia have only one breast band and are smaller and shorter-tailed; the former has a short orange-and-black bill, the latter a heavy black bill. No other plover in the region has two breast bands and an orange-rufous rump.
Habitat
Open ground with short or no vegetation: pastures, fields, playing fields, golf courses, airfields, vacant building plots and gravel roads, and the edges of ponds, rice fields and salt pans. It nests in a bare scrape on the ground, sometimes on a gravel roof or among stones. When the nest is threatened it performs the well-known distraction display with an apparently broken wing.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Resident in the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, common on most of these islands; in winter numbers are boosted by migrants. On Aruba fairly common year-round, scarcer on Curaçao and Bonaire. Regular in the northern Lesser Antilles, such as Anguilla, Sint Maarten and Antigua; further south scarce to rare, and a rare visitor to Trinidad and Tobago. Beyond the region across much of North America and Mexico, locally to Panama, and with a separate subspecies in western Ecuador, Peru and northern Chile.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
At almost every airfield, playing field and pasture in the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas; the call usually gives the bird away before it is seen. A plover walking off with a dragging wing is leading attention away from a nest or chicks; the spot is best left quickly.
Conservation status
Near Threatened. According to the IUCN the world population has declined by more than twenty per cent over three generations. In the Caribbean the species remains common in the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas; it benefits from cleared and developed open ground, but nests on verges, fields and building sites are at risk from mowing, traffic and free-roaming dogs and cats.
Scientific name
Charadrius vociferus | Linnaeus, 1758
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Charadrius in that same work. Charadrius is Late Latin, from Ancient Greek kharadrios, a plain-coloured nocturnal bird of ravines and river valleys, from kharadra 'ravine'. vociferus is Latin, from vox 'cry' and ferre 'to bear': loud-calling. The specimen the first description was based on came from South Carolina.