Plovers

All 6 species of plovers on WAnimals

Each one has its own full profile. This group does not replace them: it brings them together.

Conservation status

Where they live

Recorded in 127 countries. The ones with the most species in the group:

Where to see them

Did you know…?

• It reverses the sexual roles: the female is the more colourful, courts the male and may pair with several, while he incubates alone and raises the chicks unaided.

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• It is astonishingly trusting: it lets people approach within a few metres without fleeing, behaviour that cost it heavy hunting in the 19th century, when its feathers were used to tie fishing flies.

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• It crosses the 4,500 kilometres of ocean between Alaska and Hawaii without stopping, a continuous flight of about fifty hours over open water on which it cannot land at any point.

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• It returns to exactly the same spot every winter: there are ringed individuals that have come back for more than twenty years running to the same garden or the same Hawaiian golf course.

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• It was the unwitting cause of the Guinness Book of Records: an argument over whether the European golden plover was the fastest game bird in Europe led the managing director of the Guinness brewery to commission a book that would settle that sort of pub dispute.

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• Its winter flocks perform coordinated flights of thousands of birds, often mixed with lapwings, wheeling in unison and flashing alternately their dark backs and pale bellies.

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Ecosystems