We have a few wild animal residents in our garden who provide nice diversions while we work. Currently, there is a pair of killdeer who made a nest in a garden row and have one successfully hatched chick. So it got me wondering about killdeer and their habitat and behavior.
Killdeer live throughout the US and Canada and on the west coast of the Americas from Alaska all the way to Peru. They are a large variety in the plover family of wading birds. It is a shore bird and prefers coastal wetlands, beaches and fields, but does not live only on the coast, venturing frequently past the coast range of Oregon into the Willamette Valley. I see them regularly in Eugene at our local cemetery when walking the dog. They forage exclusively in fields and particularly like cattle pastures with standing water nearby. So it makes sense that we see them here and all across the continent.
Their nests are amazing for how minimal they are. The technical term for their type of nest is "scrape" and it aptly describes what we see in the field at Deck Family Farm: a small area of dirt with a slight indentation from moving the soil and sticks just a little bit to the sides. In this picture you can't even see the indentation because of the angle:
When I took this photo there was one hatchling running around the field (see below) and two eggs remained. Given the hot weather, the birds do not incubate them constantly. The male and female birds share the incubating responsibility and the amount of time they spend on the eggs decreases as the ambient and ground temperature go up. This was a very hot day so the adults were out and about with the first hatchling.
Our little hatchling is beautiful. In this photo it was quite newly hatched and hunkered down to hide, but when we came back a few hours later it was running around confidently. Killdeer chicks are precocial, which means they are ready to begin walking within days of hatching. Chicken chicks are also precocial, but this is another level. I saw it competently running through the small plants and over a ground tarp watching the adult who was trying to distract us with their predator-distraction display.
The animals that hunt killdeer are crows, racoons and skunks, so you can imagine that living on a farm offers some protection from those animals who avoid all our activity. But if they do come a-hunting, killdeer have a plan. Their distraction behavior is meant to pull the predator away from the nest by tricking it into thinking it could catch the apparently wounded adult. The adult runs from the nest making loud calls and then performs a broken-wing display after gaining the predator's attention. If it works, the raccoon heads for the adult who then flies away.
Killdeer are not a pest to the garden, unlike some of the other creatures we share the space with. And, you could argue that they may be beneficial since they eat insects, invertebrates and seeds.