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Turkestan Short-Toed Lark | Alaudala heinei
Turkestaanse kortteenleeuwerik | Terrera turquestana
The eastern counterpart of the Mediterranean Short-Toed Lark, from the Pontic steppe and the Anatolian salt flats east to the Central Asian steppes and the Mongolian plateau. It has been treated as a separate species since 2020, which at a stroke made it one of the hardest names on the European list: a bird that looks exactly like its western twin but lives thousands of kilometres away.
Voice
It sings mostly in flight, but also from a low perch or from the ground: a varied, melodious and long-sustained song that readily works in the calls of other birds. The usual call is a rolling prrrit or chirrick. The voice differs clearly from that of Greater Short-Toed Lark and is the most reliable way to separate the two in the field — between Turkestan and Mediterranean Short-Toed Lark, by contrast, sound is of little help.
Recording: Mats Rellmar — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Small, short-tailed and sandy to warm rufous-brown, with broad dark streaks above that become finer towards the rump. The breast is white with a band of fine, distinct streaking; the flanks carry a faint rufous to cinnamon wash. There is no dark patch on the side of the neck. The bill is short and broad-based, horn-grey with a yellowish base to the lower mandible. Note the long wings with a fairly long primary projection, the rather short tail and the short hind claw. The small crown crest is raised only in excitement, and a narrow white supercilium sits above a broad pale eye-ring. Sexes alike; juveniles spotted below.
Confusion species
It is barely separable in the field from Mediterranean Short-Toed Lark, which averages slightly paler and greyer with a slightly shorter primary projection; since the two ranges hardly meet, in practice it is where you are standing that decides. See also the Mediterranean Short-Toed Lark page. Greater Short-Toed Lark, which breeds alongside it, is larger, with a clean unstreaked breast and a dark neck patch, a longer primary projection, a smaller bill and a completely different voice. Asian Short-toed Lark (Alaudala cheleensis) further east is a shade larger and paler above, with more pointed wing tips and more white in the tail.
Habitat
Open, half-bare plains with patchy grass and low scrub: dry steppe, salt steppe and saline meadows around inland lakes such as Tuz Gölü, sandy semi-desert and bare gravel flats. It feeds by walking over the open ground between the tussocks, and nests there too, in a scrape in the soil.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
From the western edge of the Pontic steppe east through the Caspian and Central Asian steppes to the south of the Mongolian plateau, and south through eastern and central Anatolia, Transcaucasia and the north of the Iranian Plateau to Mesopotamia and the deserts south of the Hindu Kush. Within the area of this guide it is therefore an ordinary steppe breeding bird, but a large part of its range lies well beyond it. Northern birds winter in the Middle East and the north-west of the Indian subcontinent; Anatolian birds are largely resident. It has not been recorded on the Iberian Peninsula.
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
There is no shortcut: you have to go to the steppe. The easiest option is central Anatolia in May — the bare salt flats around Tuz Gölü, where the birds hang singing over the plain and feed among the salt-tolerant plants. In north-west Europe the species is an exceptional visitor and hardly ever safe on plumage alone; older records of 'Lesser Short-toed Lark' cannot all be assigned to one species or the other now that the pair has been split. Sound recordings, and where possible feathers for DNA, matter more here than photographs.
Conservation status
The IUCN assessed the species separately after the split and places it in the least concern category: the range is very large and numbers are high. The steppes it lives on are nonetheless under pressure from conversion to arable, from irrigation and from the shrinking of the salt lakes of Central Asia. Because it has only recently been counted apart, trend figures are almost non-existent; most of what is published under 'Lesser Short-toed Lark' refers to the western birds.
Scientific name
Alaudala heinei | (Homeyer, 1873) (GBIF: Calandrella rufescens)
Homeyer described the species in 1873 as Calandritis heinei; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Alaudala was introduced in 1856 by Horsfield & Moore. Alaudala is a Latin diminutive of Alauda, so 'little lark'. heinei honours the German collector Ferdinand Heine (1809–1894), whose bird collection is kept at Halberstadt. The specimen the first description was based on came from the Volga region.