Showing posts with label golden plover. Show all posts
Showing posts with label golden plover. Show all posts

Saturday 20 June 2015

Hilltop waders

A Dunlin Calidris alpina watches quietly - easily overlooked as it is little taller than the grasses


Last weekend I was surveying waders in the eastern Highlands, up on the top of the hills. It is on plateaux like these where Arctic-alpine waders such as Dunlin and Golden Plover breed, and they are beautiful birds in their breeding plumage. But they can be tricky to find.

The Dunlin can be obvious when they are displaying, chasing one another around the hilltops, singing their trilling song, but once they have eggs or chicks they hide. They are small, and even when they run away, they look not much larger than a small rodent, sneaking through the grass rather than flying away. Mostly, they will stand still and watch people walk by, oblivious of their presence.

A Dunlin runs through the grass



A Golden Plover Pluvialis apricaria stands alert, calling in alarm - difficult to not notice when watching over their chicks


Golden Plover are often as secretive when with eggs. Although some will walk or fly away and call in their peeping alarm call, many sit tight and watch people go by. But once their chicks have hatched the plovers are on constant alert, calling in loud repetitive peeps whenever a human or other potential predator approaches. Meanwhile, their chicks lie low in the grass or heather, their wonderfully golden down mimicking the yellow moss that underlies the taller plants.

Four golden plover chicks - a day old and soon ready to leave the nest 


Golden Plover chicks are some of the most beautifully coloured wader chicks, but the birds don't live on such anthropomorphic terms, don't yet perfectly matched to their hiding places up on the high mossy plateaux.

Golden balls of fluff - these plover chicks are marvelously coloured




Thursday 17 December 2009

Golden plover paper


A scientific paper, based on my work on golden plover in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, has been published in Ringing & Migration 2009, 24, 253-258.

www.bto.org/ringing/rmj/rmj-24-4.htm

Counts of spring passage Golden Plover Pluvialis apricaria in north Lewis
S. RAE, G. JONES, F. STEWART & R. TINGAY


The rich lowland grasslands of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides are used as foraging grounds by many thousands of golden plover in spring. The more boldly marked birds within these flocks are believed to be of the northern altifrons form which breeds in Iceland, and the Lewis grasslands are possibly very important for theses birds which stop there to feed before flying across the Atlantic Ocean.


A flock of golden plover of the altifrons type, feed in Lewis grassland. Some of the birds have very bold black and white plumage, probably males, while the less well marked birds are probably females.

A male Golden Plover of the southern apricaria form, which was breeding on the nearby moorland in Lewis. He is typically less boldly marked than the males seen on passage in the grasslands, as above.