Kentish plover
Kentish plover | |
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Male in breeding plumage, India | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Aves |
Order: | Charadriiformes |
Family: | Charadriidae |
Genus: | Anarhynchus |
Species: | A. alexandrinus
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Binomial name | |
Anarhynchus alexandrinus | |
Subspecies | |
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Range Breeding Resident Non-breeding Vagrant (seasonality uncertain)
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Synonyms | |
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The Kentish plover (Anarhynchus alexandrinus) is a small
The Kentish plover has a large geographical distribution, ranging from latitudes of 10º to 55º, occupying North Africa, both mainland, such as Senegal, and island, such as the Cape Verde archipelago, Central Asia, for example alkaline lakes in China, and Europe, including small populations in Spain and Austria. Some populations are migratory and often winter in Africa, whereas other populations, such as various island populations, do not migrate.[5][6] Its common English name comes from the county of Kent, where it was once found, but it has not bred in Britain since 1979.[7]
Kentish plovers are ground-nesting birds, often with a preference for low, open, moist nesting sites away from thick vegetation and human activity. They use a number of materials to build their nests, mainly consisting of shells, pebbles, grass and leaves in a small scrape in the ground.
Taxonomy
The Kentish plover was
The North American snowy plover was formerly treated as a subspecies of the Kentish plover. However, a study published in 2009 found that they were in fact distinct enough to be treated as separate species.[18] In 2023 it was proposed that the subspecies seebohmi of southern India and Sri Lanka should be elevated to full species status. The English name of Hanuman plover was suggested based on the mythology of the monkey god Hanuman who built a bridge between India and Lanka in the epic Ramayana.[19]
Three subspecies are recognised:[17]
- A. a. alexandrinus (Linnaeus, 1758) – coastal west Europe (formerly British Isles), Macaronesia (west of northwest Africa), north Africa, sporadically to Senegal; inland through central Asia to northwest, central north Indian subcontinent, north, central Mongolia and north China
- A. a. nihonensis (Deignan, 1941) – Sakhalin and Kuril Islands (southeast Russia), Hokkaido through Ryukyu Islands, Korea Peninsula, northeast, east China and Taiwan
- A. a. seebohmi (Hartert, EJO & Jackson, AC, 1915) – south India and Sri Lanka
Description
The Kentish plover is a small shorebird weighing around 40 g as an adult. Both male and female birds have black bills and dark legs, however adults have dimorphic plumage. During the breeding season, males have a black horizontal head bar, two incomplete dark breast-bands on each side of their breast, black ear coverts and a rufous nape and crown (although there is some variation between breeding populations), whereas the females are paler in these areas, without the dark markings.
Distribution, movement, and habitats
Distribution
Kentish plovers have an extremely wide geographical distribution and their habitats vary not just spatially but environmentally too. They are known to reside and breed in multiple types of habitat, from
Habitats and movement
The breeding habitats are most commonly alkali lake shores,
There have been observations of parents moving their chicks from poor food areas to better food areas, with chicks subsequently growing stronger in the high food areas. This suggests that parents strategically move their chicks and change habitats. Moving young has benefits: protection from predators, obtaining more food, avoiding competition for food and space, avoiding potential infanticide due to competition, and avoiding territory defences from others. However, this is a trade-off as there are also costs to moving young: moving expends a lot of energy, especially in young, therefore chick growth may be stunted as energy is used on movement rather than growth, the chance of mortality due to starvation or predation increases whilst moving through open areas and the area of high food may have a lot of predators in it already. Overall, chick growth and brood survival benefit from moving to a higher food area, therefore increasing reproductive success of parents, hence why the parents move their chicks. The study also found that the larger and heavier females were more likely to move chicks, perhaps because they could defend their chicks from neighbouring parents [29]
Behaviour and ecology
Breeding
The Kentish plover has an especially flexible
Along with mate changes, EPF's (
Territories
Kentish plovers inhabit sandy areas or salt-marshes in close proximity to water. Inland populations can be found near alkaline or saline lakes, ponds or reservoirs. The populations inhabiting the coastal regions can be found in semi-desert habitats i.e. on barren beaches, near lagoons and sand extractions on beaches or dunes.
Kentish plovers are territorial shorebirds; the male usually has a territory and attracts females with courtship displays. The parents are actively defending their nest territories from predators by chasing, fighting or posturing them. When approached by predators in close proximity to the nest, the Kentish plovers quickly run away from the nest and start doing distraction displays to focus the predator's attention on themselves and lure them away from the nest. These displays include calling or crawling on the ground flapping their wings. Males tend to be more aggressive than females, but females performing riskier defensive behaviors than males.[34] When a plover's territory has been invaded, it invades a neighboring family's territory. This is when fights between males frequently occur because the plovers see their broods threatened. During such fights, it occurs that chicks get injured or even killed.[35] When approached by a predator, chicks usually try to find a spot where they can hide, crouch down and stay motionless to remain unseen. When they are older, they try to run away with their parents.
Nesting and incubation
Kentish plovers either nest solitarily or in a loose
Parental care
Parental care is variable within birds and the Kentish plover has a slightly different mechanism to other shorebirds. As discussed above, both parents incubate the eggs, however both parents do not always stick around once the eggs have hatched. It is not unusual for one parent to leave the chicks after a variable amount of time; this is referred to as brood desertion. Brood desertion is the ‘termination of care, by either one or both parents, before the offspring are capable of surviving independently’ [42] and usually occurs after one week of the brood being accompanied by both parents. Brood desertion has been observed in both males and females, however females desert the brood significantly more frequently than males.[31] Studies have shown that both the male and female Kentish plover can provide adequate care for their brood on their own, so it is not the differences in the ability of the parents that determines which parent deserts the brood and which stays to care for the chicks. However, studies have also shown that after desertion females have a larger chance of breeding success than males, potentially due to many Kentish plover populations maintaining a male-biased OSR (operational sex ratio - the ratio of males actively breeding to females). Therefore, is it hypothesized that the amount of reproductive success gained by desertion is what actually determines who deserts the brood,.[43][21] In short, males and females can care for their brood equally, however females gain more by deserting their brood than males, resulting in a higher amount of female desertion over male. The non-deserting parent can continue to brood their chicks up to 80% of the time for over 20 days after hatching, as precocial young are vulnerable and exposed to external temperatures.
If the parent bird feels that the eggs or chicks are under attack, then it will feign injury in order to divert attention towards itself. [44]
Calls
The alarm call, referred to as kittup call, is often heard both on the ground and in the air and can occur on its own, or paired with a tweet, heard as too-eet. The threat note is described as a "twanging, metallic, dwee-dwee-dweedweedwee sound".[45]
Feeding
Kentish plovers either forage individually or in loose flocks of 20-30 individuals (outside the breeding season), and occasionally can incorporate into larger flocks of up to 260 individuals of multiple species.[46][47] Their main source of food consists of miniature aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates such as insects and their larvae (e.g. beetles, grasshoppers or flies), molluscs, crustaceans, spiders and marine worms.[46] They are obligate visual foragers and often feed at the shoreline of lakes, lagoons or ponds in invertebrate-rich moist-soil areas.[48] They forage by looking, stopping or running and then pecking to catch the prey, but also probe the sand to search for prey, or catch flies by holding their mouths open.[49] The Kentish plover's capability of identifying cues for prey is influenced by light, wind and rain.[50] At night, their ability of finding prey might be restricted, but plovers have been shown to have a good nocturnal vision due to their large eyes and enhanced retinal visual sensitivity,.[51][52]
Status and conservation
Status
The Kentish plover is classified as
The global population size of the Kentish plover is continuously declining although for some populations the trends are unknown.[53] The European population is estimated at 43,000-70,000 individuals, forming around 15% of the global population (estimated at 100,000-500,000 individuals).[54]
Threats
A major threat to this species is habitat loss and disturbance. Human activity such as tourists walking through protected areas, pollution, unsustainable harvesting and urbanisation can destroy nesting sites. Plover populations can also be affected by rural human activity, for example fishermen walking through protected plover breeding sites, bringing large numbers of dogs with them- a known predator of plover eggs. Breeding birds respond to human disturbance disproportionately when dogs are present,
Management
The Kentish plover is currently on the Annex I of the EU Birds Directive and Annex II of the Bern Convention.[54] Conservation actions proposed to protect the species include the conservation of their natural habitat by creating or elaborating protected areas at breeding sites. This is essential to stop pollution, land reclamation and urbanisation. Human interaction should be controlled and kept at a minimum.
References
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