All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Plovers and lapwings › Long-Toed Lapwing
Long-Toed Lapwing | Vanellus crassirostris
Langteenkievit | Avefría Palustre
The Long-Toed Lapwing is the lapwing of floating plants. With its exceptionally long toes it walks over water lilies and water cabbage like a jacana, far from the shore. In the region it is tied to the great floodplains of the Okavango, Chobe, Zambezi and Kafue.
Voice
A metallic kik-kik-kik or tik-tik, like that of Blacksmith Lapwing but softer and less ringing. When disturbed, a rapid, high alarm and dive-bombing over the nest.
Recording: Jonathan Onongo — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
30–31 cm. Face, forehead, throat and foreneck are white and contrast sharply with the black hind crown, hindneck and breast, which together form a black cap and broad breast band. The back is grey-brown and the belly white. The wing coverts are largely white, so that in flight the wing is white with black primaries. The bill is dull red with a black tip, the eye red, and the legs dull red with very long toes. A small spur sits at the bend of the wing. The sexes are alike; juveniles have brown feather edges and a duller black.
Confusion species
Blacksmith Lapwing Vanellus armatus has a white crown and black face, the exact reverse of Long-Toed Lapwing, and a grey back. African Wattled Lapwing Vanellus senegallus is grey-brown with yellow wattles and yellow legs and usually stands on the shore or in wet grassland, not on floating plants. Compare also White-Crowned Lapwing Vanellus albiceps, which lives on sandbars of the large rivers and has yellow wattles.
Habitat
Permanent and seasonal marshes with floating vegetation: lagoons, channels and flooded floodplains with water lilies and water cabbage, and the edges of papyrus swamp. It forages walking over the plant mat and along muddy edges. The nest is a scrape in wet vegetation or on a floating mass of plants.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In the north of the region: the Okavango Delta, the Linyanti and the Chobe in northern Botswana, the Zambezi Region of Namibia, the Zambezi and Kafue flats and the Bangweulu swamps in Zambia, Lake Kariba and the middle Zambezi in Zimbabwe, and locally in Malawi and central Mozambique; also in eastern Angola. Vagrant to north-eastern South Africa. Beyond the region north to East Africa, South Sudan and Lake Chad.
- 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
Take a boat or drive along the lagoons of the Okavango or the Chobe and search the water lilies: the bird's white head and black breast stand out against the green. Often in pairs, among the jacanas and herons.
Conservation status
Not threatened; locally common on the great floodplains. Dependent on the annual flood cycle, and therefore sensitive to dams and water abstraction upstream.
Scientific name
Vanellus crassirostris | (Hartlaub, 1855)
Hartlaub described the species in 1855 as Chettusia crassirostris; 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. crassirostris comes from the Latin crassus, 'thick', and rostrum, 'bill' — although the bill does not look especially thick in the field. The specimen the first description was based on came from Nubia (Sudan).