Kentish Plover

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. In the early breeding season, it is easy to distinguish between males and females since the ornaments are very pronounced, but as the breeding season progresses, the differences between the two sexes decrease. Moreover, males have longer tarsi and longer flank feathers than females. Longer flank feathers are thought to be an advantage for incubation and brood care, as the quality of feathers is associated with heat insulation. There are multiple significant predictors of plumage ornamentation in Kentish plovers. Firstly, the interaction between the advancement of the breeding season and rainfall seem to affect ornamentation. Male ornaments become more elaborated over the course of a breeding season in regions with high rainfall, whereas in regions with low rainfall, male ornaments become lighter. …

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 desert with ground temperatures reaching 50 °C to tundra. The distribution of this species' breeding areas covers Europe, Asia and Africa. In Europe, populations are typically found in the west; although there was once a breeding population in Hungary, Kentish plovers no longer breed there. In Africa, populations are found on the southern coast of Senegal and along the Northern coast of the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea coast. The breeding area continues along the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain in the Middle East. Small populations can be found on islands too, such as the Cape Verde archipelago, the Canary Islands, and the Azores. It is a rare vagrant in Australia. Some populations do not migrate, such as the Maio (Cape Verde) population, however other populations can migrate reasonable distances, for example, plovers that spend winter in North Africa have been known to migrate to Turkey and Greece in the spring. Some birds breeding in western Europe are not known to travel very far, just within Europe, however some do travel, mainly to Western Africa.

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. 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. They are obligate visual foragers and often feed at the shoreline of lakes, lagoons or ponds in invertebrate-rich moist-soil areas. 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. The Kentish plover's capability of identifying cues for prey is influenced by light, wind and rain. 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.