Country Ecology: Killdeer [06/14/2008]

By David Eastman

During an early June a year or so ago, I noticed a new arrival at my home in Tamworth. Even with the lush grasses of fields neighboring my domicile, I was still surprised to see a leggy killdeer rapidly running down Bryant Road, just in front of my vehicle. Usually, killdeers thrive in larger agricultural fields than the one across the street, but apparently that terrain was good enough for this widespread bird to hunt bugs in. The next day, it was hunting on my lawn, too, as well as taking up residence just across Whittier road. I had not seen a second bird yet, which would make me wonder if eggs were laid nearby, maybe in the gravel of the lot there where the trucks park. If so, this would soon present a curious form of behavior by this highly adaptive upland plover. Paul Doherty, the former Fish and Game officer of renown, speculated in one of his outdoors columns a good while back, that killdeers must have moved inland from the shorelines of New England, into newly plowed fields to create their peculiar nest scrapes following colonial times. It makes sense, because the continuous forest of pre-settlement would have never provided them the necessary stony and pebbly fields for their well camouflaged nest depressions to be found in. Native Americans had some corn patches along our rivers floodplains, but that was it. Killdeers utilize sandy or gravelly areas to lay their eggs, which are so speckled, that they blend right in with the pebbles, and other small stones and chips there. Some are added for this clever use of these glacial ingredients of our New Hampshire soil.One has to squat down and verily squint to see their eggs at all. And your vision will swim, becoming blurred by the concentration, so that you will lose focus even if you know exactly where the eggs are located. The common way one finds a killdeer nest is by listening to their loud, piercing kill-dee-ah call as they precariously trot away, hobbling with their distraction display. They will fake broken wings and call piteously until they have led you away from the nests location. You may not even know they have a clutch of eggs present as you observe this feigning birds leading you away from them. The best way to have the alert bird demonstrate the nest site is to move suspiciously towards its possible location, and then watch the decoying parent killdeer get more and more upset as you close in. They will up the crippled action as you do so.Even then, you will have a hard time finally spotting their four-five eggs in your driveway or barren, sandy area these plovers have chosen for their reproduction. Sometimes this can get funny. I have had phone calls in the past from a homeowner that says some strange, brown-and-white bird with two rings around its neck has taken over their driveway, and wont let them park the family car. They wonder what the heck is going on, and how come the handsome bird has something against them as a human. I have to laugh, while informing them that the bird has laid its eggs which are hard to detect, but it will be finished with hijacking their parking space in a few weeks. Usually the person calling gets the joke and settles back to observing the killdeer for the remainder of the time. But they may or may not ever discover the elusive, spotted eggs.The adult birds incubate the eggs for 24 to 28 days up to when they are ready to hatch. Then, a chick takes 18 to 36 hours to break out of the shell. Every piece of it will be removed from the nests vicinity by the parents within a very brief time. When the young are first hatched, they are completely covered in warm, thick down and resemble their parents except that they have only one band, not two, across their chest. At first this down is wet, but it dries within an hour, and then the active chicks look like fluffy balls with rather long legs. Unlike those of songbirds, precocial shorebird young leave the nest as soon as this is completed. So, soon the parents will lead the chicks to a feeding area. That is when you get your driveway back.The omnivorous killdeers choice of food covers a wide variety of insect pests such as ticks and mosquitoes, and other invertebrate life, much of which is harmful to agriculture, such as clover-root and alfalfa weevils, June beetle larvae, wire-worms, the larvae of click beetles, and brown fruit beetles. Other insects, such as grasshoppers, caterpillars, ants, bugs, caddie flies, dragon flies, and two-winged flies make up the rest of the diet. Dave Eastman also broadcasts Country Ecology four times weekly over WMWV 93.5 fm. As Vice President of the Lakes Region Chapter/ASNH, he welcomes you to monthly programs at the Loon Center in Moultonborough. Contact him at: cebirdman@hotmail.Com