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Blacksmith Lapwing | Vanellus armatus
Wapenkievit | Avefría Herrera
The Blacksmith Lapwing is boldly blocked in black, white and grey and is almost always beside water. Its alarm call is a hard metallic tink tink tink, like a hammer on an anvil, which is the source of its English name. Anyone approaching the nest gets a dive-bombing overhead.
Voice
A hard, clear, metallic tink tink tink, in series and often accelerating as the bird grows more agitated; the sound carries far across open water. Also a short tik as a contact call, and a high, sustained series during dive attacks on intruders, with pairs and neighbours alarming together.
Recording: African Bioacoustics Community — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
28–31 cm. Crown and hindneck are white, forehead, face, throat and breast black, the mantle and wing coverts grey, and the belly white. In flight the wing is banded black, white and grey, and the tail is white with a black terminal band. The eye is dark red, the bill black and the legs black. A black spur sits at the bend of the wing and is used in attacks. The sexes are alike; the female averages slightly larger. Juveniles are brownish rather than black, with rufous feather edges and a dull eye.
Confusion species
White-Crowned Lapwing Vanellus albiceps of the large rivers has a white central crown stripe, yellow wattles at the bill base and yellow legs. Crowned Lapwing Vanellus coronatus is sandy brown with a black crown ringed in white and red legs, and keeps instead to dry, short grassland. African Wattled Lapwing Vanellus senegallus is brown with a grey head and yellow legs. No other lapwing in the region is so sharply divided into black, white and grey.
Habitat
The shores of any fresh water: pans, farm dams, river islands, marsh edges, sewage works and wet hollows in grassland, and also closely grazed pasture and lawns beside water. It forages walking over open mud, short vegetation and the waterline. The nest is a scrape on bare ground or gravel, often on an island or an open shore.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Across almost all of southern Africa wherever there is surface water: South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi and Angola; most numerous on the highveld and along the major river systems, and scarcest in the core Namib and the dry Kalahari. Beyond the region it reaches north to Tanzania and Kenya. Its range expanded during the twentieth century with the spread of farm dams and irrigation.
- 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
Year-round at any dam or pan, including the middle of the day. Walk the waterline and wait for the alarm: the metallic ticking is heard before the bird is seen. In the breeding season, July to November, pairs betray the nest by diving and calling overhead — turn back then, because the eggs and chicks lie in the open on the ground. Chicks flatten themselves and are then almost impossible to see.
Conservation status
Not threatened; common and increased in numbers. The spread of farm dams, irrigation, sewage works and closely grazed pasture has extended the range north and west. Nests on open shores are lost to sudden rises in water level and to trampling by livestock and people.
Scientific name
Vanellus armatus | (Burchell, 1822)
Burchell described the species in 1822 as Charadrius armatus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Vanellus was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Vanellus is the diminutive of the Latin vannus, 'winnowing fan' — for the sound and shape of the broad, rounded wings in flight, which recall a fan being winnowed. armatus is Latin for 'armed', for the sharp yellow spurs on the wing bend with which this lapwing defends itself. The specimen the first description was based on came from Griquatown, Cape Province.