Tuesday, October 22, 2013

American Plover??

Last night in fading light and horrendous conditions at times I picked up on a very grey/buff looking plover amongst the goldies. Looking on the internet all images of american golden plover showed a super which this bird didn't appear to have but I only had my bins with me.

I rang Nick Dawtry who later asked me to check the picture of the shoveler from the previous day and sure enough there on the right hand side stood the bird I'd been looking at.

Thoughts as to its ID please.


7 comments:

Andrew Huyton said...


Dark primary edges seem to be shown in this photo as well as the pale super, it's looking pretty good to me. But I'm obviously biased and would welcome the views of others.

martynbirder said...

now that is interesting,
but is it an American Golden Plover?
from what I can see in the photo I'd say not - it looks the same size as the other Golden Plover and to me AGP is a slimmer bird and often looks longer legged and I would have thought it would look greyer at this time of year, they are also slightly longer billed and the eye looks larger (probably due to the smaller head)

saying that though that's only from looking at this photo, and these small images are not the best to try ID things from and in the field it may look different, well done for noticing this, I'll try get up there tomorrow for a look

martynbirder said...

this may help a little

I've just been doing a bit of research and came across this in Handbook of Bird Identification in the description of AGP

- beware occasional grey-looking European Golden -

can't say I've ever seen one like that myself

David Sutcliffe said...

I have never seen 'American' Andy so not all that good for me to call. The bird does look greyer and darker towards the rear but other features to look for 9according to the books)are not clear. 2 of the 'goldies' show very strong supercilium as well. Some more photo's might be helpful if anyone can get some. Well worth a careful look at!

heavy birder said...

Think its a Euraisian Goldie, looks odd though. Yanks look longer in the leg and have a longer priamarie projection.American juvs tend to look more like a small Grey Plover rather than a goldie.Hope Imm wrong.

darrell j prest said...

we used to birds like this amongst the golden plovers in the 90's
just looks like a golden plover

AndyC said...

I think you can see this bird in the photo below with the Shovler on it....Interesting but a goldie..if we ever get an American/pacific a good place to look will be Ringstone so well done for picking it out...