Collared Pratincole | Glareola pratincola

Voice

Noisy, and usually heard before it is seen. The call is a sharp, rattling kik-kik-kirrik, closest to a tern; over a colony, circling birds keep up a drawn-out kyerrr. At dusk, when the flock spreads out over the surrounding land, that sound carries for several hundred metres.

Identification

Plain olive-brown above with no pattern, white below, with a warm buff wash across the breast. The throat is cream, neatly ringed by a thin black border; the bill is black with a red base and the eye-ring is white. Legs short and black. At rest the tail streamers reach or just pass the wing tips. In flight the white rump stands out against the black tail, and the underwing coverts are chestnut, with a narrow white trailing edge along the secondaries.

Confusion species

Everything hinges on flight views. The underwing coverts are chestnut; on Black-Winged Pratincole (Glareola nordmanni) they are black. Along the trailing edge of the secondaries runs a thin but clean white line, which both Black-winged and Oriental Pratincole (Glareola maldivarum) lack. Neither point can be settled on a perched bird. What the perched bird does give is tail length: on Collared the streamers reach the wing tips, on the other two they fall short.

Habitat

Bare saline flats with short vegetation or none, drying lake shores, salt pans and the bunds between ricefields. Nests in loose colonies on open ground, often on dried mud, a salt crust or a fallow corner beside water. Feeds on the wing over grassland, rice and saltmarsh, kilometres from the colony, and is most active at first light and at dusk.

Range and movements

Breeds around the Mediterranean and in North Africa, east to central Asia, with European birds wintering in the Sahel. In Iberia the main strongholds are the Guadalquivir marshes, with the Brazo del Este and the rice fields of Isla Mayor, and the Ebro delta; smaller colonies sit at La Janda, the Fuente de Piedra lagoon, El Hondo and the Santa Pola saltpans, and in the rice fields of the Vegas Altas del Guadiana in Extremadura. Birds arrive there in March and April and leave between late July and September. Further strongholds lie along the northern Mediterranean, from the Camargue to Anatolia.

• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

Late June, an hour before sunset, at the Brazo del Este or Isla Mayor is the safest combination: the birds leave the roost and hunt low over the rice fields. Stand at the edge of a rice field so they cross between you and the sun, and wait for low passes rather than approaching a perched bird. One sharp frame of the open underwing from below, with the primaries crisp, settles it: chestnut versus black, and the white trailing edge, outweigh half a day watching a bird on the ground.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, but European numbers are falling. The pressures are loss of seasonal wetland and saline flats, cultivation and mowing of ricefields during the breeding season, trampling of nests by stock, and insecticide use, which removes the flying insects on which the species depends entirely.

Scientific name

Glareola pratincola | (Linnaeus, 1766)

Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as Hirundo pratincola; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Glareola was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Glareola is a Latin diminutive of glarea 'gravel', after the bare gravelly ground where pratincoles nest. pratincola means 'meadow-dweller', from Latin pratum 'meadow' and incola 'inhabitant'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Austria.