All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Plovers and lapwings › Spur-Winged Lapwing
Spur-Winged Lapwing | Vanellus spinosus
Sporenkievit | Avefría Espolonada
The Spur-Winged Lapwing is one of the commonest waders in East and North-east Africa, but barely reaches southern Africa. The first record for the region was a bird on the Chobe floodplain in Botswana in 1989. The species is spreading south and is now established locally in northern Malawi and Zambia.
Voice
A sharp, metallic tik or kiek, often repeated, and a loud three-syllable call rendered as did-he-do-it. Noisy when disturbed, dive-bombing over the nest in the manner of Blacksmith Lapwing.
Recording: He Wenjin/文进 — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
25–28 cm. A sharply patterned lapwing with a black cap reaching below the eye, white cheeks and neck sides, a black stripe down the centre of the throat and foreneck, and a black breast and belly. The back and wing coverts are sandy brown; the undertail coverts and rump are white. The eye is red, the bill and legs are black. In flight it shows a broad white diagonal band across the wing, black flight feathers, and a white tail with a black terminal band. A black spur sits at the bend of the wing. The sexes are alike; juveniles are duller, with pale fringes to the upperparts.
Confusion species
Blacksmith Lapwing Vanellus armatus is the only lapwing in the region with a comparable black-and-white pattern, but has a white crown and hindneck and a grey, not sandy-brown, back. White-Crowned Lapwing Vanellus albiceps has white underparts, a grey head with a white crown stripe and long yellow wattles. A lapwing with a black belly and brown back on the northern edge of the region is almost certainly this species.
Habitat
Shores of lakes, rivers, dams and marshes, and damp grassland and rice fields near water. It forages walking over mud and short vegetation; the nest is a scrape on bare ground close to water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Rare in the far north of the region: local and in small numbers in northern Malawi and Zambia. Further south a vagrant, with fewer than ten records, mainly in northern Botswana. Beyond the region common from Tanzania and Kenya north to Sudan and Egypt, west across the Sahel to Senegal, and in the Middle East; it also breeds in small numbers in south-eastern Europe.
- 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
Check the shores of Lake Malawi and north-eastern Zambia among Blacksmith and African Wattled Lapwings. In the south, any bird with a black belly and brown back is worth reporting: a photograph of the head and underparts is enough to document it.
Conservation status
Not threatened; common over most of its range and spreading southward. Too rare in the region to show a trend of its own.
Scientific name
Vanellus spinosus | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Charadrius spinosus; 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. spinosus is Latin for 'thorny', from spina 'thorn', after the sharp spur on the bend of the wing. The specimen the first description was based on came from Egypt.