White-tailed lapwing
White-tailed lapwing | |
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near Hodal in Faridabad District of Haryana, India | |
Scientific classification | |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Aves |
Order: | Charadriiformes |
Family: | Charadriidae |
Genus: | Vanellus |
Species: | V. leucurus |
Binomial name | |
Vanellus leucurus (Lichtenstein, 1823) | |
Synonyms | |
Charadrius leucurus Lichtenstein, 1823 |
The white-tailed lapwing or white-tailed plover (Vanellus leucurus) is a wader in the lapwing genus.
This medium-sized lapwing is long-legged and fairly long-billed. It is the only lapwing likely to be seen in other than very shallow water, where it picks insects and other small prey mainly from the surface.
Adults are slim erect birds with a brown back and foreneck, paler face and grey breast. Its long yellow legs, pure white tail and distinctive brown, white and black wings make this species unmistakable. Young birds have a scaly back, and may show some brown in the tail.
The breeding season call is a peewit, similar to northern lapwing.
It breeds semi-colonially on inland marshes in Iraq, Iran and southern Russia. Four eggs are laid in a ground nest. The Iraqi and Iranian breeders are mainly residents, but Russian birds migrate south in winter to the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and north east Africa. It is a very rare vagrant in western Europe, the first example in Britain being found at Packington, Warwickshire on 12 July 1975.
The white-tailed lapwing is one of the species to which the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies.
Gallery
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at Sultanpur National Park in Gurgaon District of Haryana, India.
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at Sultanpur National Park in Gurgaon District of Haryana, India.
References
- ↑ BirdLife International (2012). "Vanellus leucurus". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.2. International Union for Conservation of Nature. Retrieved 26 November 2013.
- Dean, A.R.; Fortey, J.E.; Phillips, E.G. (November 1977). "White-tailed Plover: new to Britain and Ireland". British Birds 70: 465–471. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008.
- Hayman, Peter; Marchant, John; Prater, Tony. Shorebirds: An identification guide to the waders of the world. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-60237-8.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Vanellus leucurus. |
Wikispecies has information related to: Vanellus leucurus |
- BirdLife species factsheet for Vanellus leucurus
- Vanellus leucurus on Avibase
- White-tailed lapwing videos, photos, and sounds at the Internet Bird Collection
- White-tailed lapwing photo gallery at VIREO (Drexel University)
- Interactive range map of Vanellus leucurus at IUCN Red List maps
- Audio recordings of White-tailed lapwing on Xeno-canto.
- Vanellus leucurus in the Flickr: Field Guide Birds of the World
- White-tailed lapwing media at ARKive