All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Plovers and lapwings › White-Crowned Lapwing
White-Crowned Lapwing | Vanellus albiceps
Witkruinkievit | Avefría Coroniblanca
The White-Crowned Lapwing is the lapwing of sandbars in the large rivers. Long yellow wattles hang on either side of the bill, and in flight the wing is almost entirely white. It is noisy and attacks every intruder on its stretch of river, including crocodiles and hippos.
Voice
A high, piercing pee-yeu or kee-kee-kee, often in rapid series; pairs call loudly at each other and at intruders. One of the characteristic sounds of the lowveld riverbank.
Recording: Étienne Leroy — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
28–31 cm. The head and neck are grey with a narrow white stripe along the centre of the crown from forehead to nape. Long yellow wattles hang from the base of the bill. The back is brown; the breast and belly are clean white with no breast band. The bill is black with a yellow base, the eye yellow and the legs yellow. In flight the wing is white with only black primaries and a narrow black edge to the coverts; the tail is white with a black terminal band. A long black spur sits at the bend of the wing. The sexes are alike; juveniles have shorter wattles and brown feather edges.
Confusion species
African Wattled Lapwing Vanellus senegallus also has yellow wattles and yellow legs, but is entirely grey-brown, with red wattles above the yellow, a streaked head, a white forehead patch instead of a crown stripe and a brown, not white, breast. Blacksmith Lapwing Vanellus armatus is black, white and grey and has black legs. Long-Toed Lapwing Vanellus crassirostris has a white face with black hind crown and breast, and red legs.
Habitat
Sandbars, islands and bare banks of broad, slow-flowing rivers, usually with riverine forest along the bank. Sometimes at the edges of large dams. The nest is a scrape on a sandbar, and at high water the birds move up or downstream.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Along the large rivers in the north and east of the region: the Zambezi, the Chobe, the Okavango and the Kwando in Botswana and the Zambezi Region and Kavango of Namibia, the Luangwa and the Kafue in Zambia, the Shire in Malawi, the Save, the Runde and the Limpopo in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and in South Africa mainly the Limpopo and the rivers of the Kruger National Park, such as the Olifants, the Letaba and the Sabie. Also in eastern Angola. Beyond the region along the rivers of West and Central Africa to Tanzania.
- 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
In the Kruger National Park, from the low-level bridges over the Olifants, the Letaba and the Sabie: pairs often stand on the sandbars below the bridge. Their high call gives them away from afar. In flight, watch for the almost entirely white wings.
Conservation status
Not threatened, but with a small population in South Africa that depends on naturally flowing rivers. Dams, sand mining and irregular river flows destroy the sandbars on which the species breeds.
Scientific name
Vanellus albiceps | Gould, 1834
Gould described the species in 1834 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. 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. albiceps comes from the Latin albus, 'white', and -ceps, 'headed' — for the white stripe along the crown. The specimen the first description was based on came from Niger River or Bioko (Equatorial Guinea).