What a Strange Bird

While everyone was away for the weekend, a little bird decided to lay an egg in the earthy colored pea-gravel lining the pathway to our office. I bet it may have been regretting it's decision come Monday with everyone walking up the path - sounded like the poor thing was going to have a heart attack every time someone went past.

The colored stones actually blend pretty well with the bird, especially with its back towards you - it has some very classy black and white stripes across its neck that remind me of a French shirt. The eggs (the first was quickly joined by a second mid-week) are pretty hard to spot too, but the speckles set them off just slightly.

My co-workers kept calling it a quail, but I didn't see it when I looked up quail in an Google image search. Plus I kept seeing these sandpiper looking things running around and I was pretty sure they were the same bird.

So I started really looking in earnest for some way to identify what kind of bird it was.

I finally came across www.whatbird.com. They have a great feature that lets you input different aspects of the bird and lets you compare images. The image of the Killdeer didn't seem quite right, but it was the closest one I could figure, and it was the behavioral facts that really convinced me.

So these nutcase shore birds typically make their nests in pebbles, far from water, and rely on distraction and "broken-wing displays" to protect their young. "Eat me! I'm tasty and broken and easy to catch. Eggs? What eggs? I don't see any eggs! But I do see me! All tasty! haha!" (flaps away perfectly fine).

As whatbird says, the male and female are similar in appearance, and both incubate the egg, so it was a little hard to tell if there was one bird or if they were taking turns, until we saw them both running around at the same time, try to distract us from the fact that there were now three eggs! Luckily the eggs are supposed to hatch in a little less than one month, but now that I think about it, I wonder how long it is before the babies can actually fly away? I wish the whole family luck, it seems like the odds of a nest surviving out the open like that are slim, but on the other hand, Killdeer aren't endangered or anything, so I guess it's been working out for them as a species. I'd still think they might want to nest a little closer to a shrub or something, there's plenty of them around. Who knows!