Killdeer 10" shorebirds with two black breast bands

Killdeer spread their wings, shriek, and dash across open ground to distract predators from their nest.

Killdeer nests are out in the open but hard to see. Parents position the eggs with pointy ends together and incubate 24-28 days.

Killdeer chicks are well camouflaged against these bark chips.

Photos by Terry Gray UI Arboretum April 27-28, 2003

by Sarah Walker, from the May 2006 Newsletter

Have you heard killdeer around the edges of town? They’re the ones making the persistent and shrill “didideer! didideer!” while they run away from you looking just like they’re dragging a broken wing. This is an act, and it means a nestful of eggs or chicks is nearby. The killdeer parent is making its famous “distraction display” to lure you away. When danger comes, adult killdeer don’t sit tight and hide quietly, they get loud and conspicuous. Scientists argue about how this kind of behavior evolved in ground-nesting birds but agree that fear is the motivator, because tame birds don’t do this.

Killdeer are shorebirds, but often live far inland from water. They have freely adapted to human-modified environments. Some of the nesting sites they seem to prefer are golf courses, soccer fields, railroad beds, and vacant lots. The broken-wing act is one of the survival tricks they use to keep their nests and chicks from being stepped on, snarfed up by a dog, or run over by a lawn mower.

Here’s a good description from David Attenborough’s The Life of the Bird: “As you approach one of their nests, whether unwillingly or knowingly, the sitting bird will leave it, often unobtrusively. When it is some distance away, it suddenly makes itself conspicuous by trailing one or even both its wings and screaming, for all the world as if it were crippled.” Then it “suddenly and apparently miraculously recovers and rises into the air.” It seems suicidal to rely on this kind of deception, but “the birds’ priceless ability to rise into the air seems to save them every time.”

Other ground-nesting shorebirds take risky acts for their young. A sandpiper that nests on the tundra imitates a fleeing lemming by running with its tail down and wings trailing to lure Arctic foxes away from its nest. A member of another bird group, the green-tailed towhee, runs with its tail held up to make coyotes think it might be a panicked chipmunk.

Shorebirds, of which 40-50 species can be seen in the Pacific Northwest, include birds with intriguing names like stilts, avocets, snipe, oystercatcher, sandpipers, plovers, and phalaropes. Most shorebirds are gregarious and undertake long migrations between breeding and wintering grounds. Golden plovers make annual trips between the arctic and South America. But killdeer may breed and nest only short distances from their wintering grounds, and are usually seen in small groups. There are killdeer in Idaho year-round, and on the Palouse from March to October.

Killdeer belong to the plover group of shorebirds. Plovers are visual hunters with large eyes that take prey from the ground surface. When they spy a beetle, grasshopper, ant, tick, or caterpillar, they run to it, tip down and peck it off the ground, then run until they see another insect. Running and stopping, running and stopping, identifies plovers from sandpipers, which keep moving when feeding. On the Palouse when spring rains saturate our soils, soil-dwelling invertebrates are forced to the surface, a bonanza for killdeer.

Birds that adapt to human-modified environments develop some pretty strange behaviors. For instance, some killdeer like to nest on flat gravel roofs! But when the chicks hatch, they need to get off the roof or they will starve. Killdeer parents don’t bring food to their young like many birds do. Instead, they lead their young, which are born downy and mobile, to food and let them peck at it for themselves. Some killdeer chicks have survived leaps from seven story buildings, but many succumb from the fall. If there is a ledge or parapet around the edge of the roof that’s too much for the chicks to climb, they will be trapped there and die.

Killdeer are birds that say their own name, “kill-DEER, kill-DEER.” Have you heard them this spring?

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