Dan's Feathursday Feature: Killdeer

“There are two things which need only to be announced to be destroyed: silence and virtue.”
     —Barbara Ehrenreich in Living with a Wild God

Guess which of these two things—silence and virtue—the Killdeer destroys. Visit a local lakefront park between March and October and you will hear every Killdeer within earshot screaming the announcement: “It sure is quiet here, isn’t it!? Isn’t it!!?”

In 1768, when Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus was working on the tenth edition of his magnum opus titled Systema Naturae, he finally got around to assigning a Latin species name to the bird known in the British colonies as the Killdeer. As always, he sought a name that would capture the essence of that species. He himself had never seen or heard a Killdeer, so he zipped off emails to fellow naturalists, and consulted the field guides of the day, and learned that the bird was usually referred to as the “noisy plover,” or the “chattering plover.” He gave it the scientific name Charadrius vociferus.

Vociferous plover. Hmmm. When’s the last time you heard the word vociferous in daily conversation? “I wish Tom wouldn’t be so vociferous in the weekly staff meetings.” Nah, “motor mouth” is more like it. “Susie, please don’t be so vociferous” will probably come out instead as “Stifle it already!” Likewise, when I seek some peace and quiet at a local lakeshore park and am harangued instead by a half dozen kreeee-kreeee-ing Killdeer, vociferous is not the first adjective that comes to mind. However, I have to admit that, though a fancy word like vociferous can make a vice sound like a virtue, the word suits the Killdeer to a T: the bird carries a big voice.

I don’t mean to complain. The Killdeer is just living up to its name. And as I walk the park, selfishly seeking quiet, I know the Killdeer has good reason to be vociferous. It is the Killdeer’s space that I am invading, after all. So out of respect for the Killdeer, let’s talk about that space for a moment. I want to tell you the story of a Killdeer family I met in the spring of 2019.

It was April 22, and I was walking my favorite lakefront park. The flat grassland had been cut the previous autumn, so the field was a featureless expanse of bare ground, brown stubble, and a smattering of ankle-high clumps of early sprouting lambsquarters. I was running late, and decided to take a short-cut across the middle of the field. I barely made it fifty yards off my beaten path when a Killdeer suddenly appeared on the ground not twenty feet from me, screaming and dragging its wing at a strange angle. It was clear I had wandered near its nest, and it was trying to distract me by acting injured.

I froze, and then began taking tentative, halting steps, like an infantryman traversing a minefield. The Killdeer’s wing had “healed,” and it was now zig-zagging back and forth in a manner that was both distracting and threatening, screaming all the while, and making it very difficult to stay calm. I fixed my gaze on a point five feet ahead of me, made sure there were no eggs between me and that point, and then shuffled forward, five feet at a time. On the third shuffle I saw the nest, a bit to the left of the line I was following. What a relief. I could exit the area without harming the nest and leave the parent Killdeer in peace.

Fortunately, the nest was right next to a large white stone that stood out in that otherwise flat terrain. There were four eggs, mottled pastel brown, arranged neatly with their narrow ends pointed in. Keeping one eye on that stone, I quickly put about a hundred feet between me and the nest before turning around to take a good look. I found the rock easily, but it took a good minute of intense searching around the rock with my binoculars before I was able to find the eggs again, hidden in plain sight.

I triangulated my location and vowed to return to that spot as often as possible, to follow the progress of those eggs. April 24, no change. April 29, the parent bird was sitting on the eggs—I  presumed they had not yet hatched. May 2, still no change—I was beginning to worry. May 9, finally I could see clearly that two eggs had hatched. May 10, three chicks lay in the nest, with one egg still intact. May 11, three tiny chicks were up and about, scampering around the nest area, with the parent birds watching nervously. The fourth egg had disappeared, and there was no sign of a fourth chick. Over the next twelve days I caught fleeting glimpses of the chicks, scurrying for cover in the clumps of green as I approached. I never saw all three at the same time, so I had no way of knowing if they all survived.

In late May I approached the nest to see if I could find sign of that fourth egg. I looked all around the white rock carefully, and I found—nothing. There was no indication whatsoever that a Killdeer pair had fledged a family in that very spot. No egg, no feathers, no indentation in the dirt—nothing.

That alone should not have surprised me, I suppose. After all, most plovers make rudimentary nests on bare ground. But there are moments when nothing makes a big impression. As I looked down at the bare ground at my feet, I realized that for all its bluster and bombast, for all its territorial aggressiveness and its noisy distraction displays, when it comes right down to it, the Killdeer lives quietly and walks lightly on this earth. It lays its eggs on the bare ground, and once they have hatched, there is no sign they were even there. The bird’s nest is the embodiment of the expression “here today, gone tomorrow.”

There’s a deep lesson here for me, I thought. And as I started down the rabbit hole of facile comparisons between this bird’s nest and my own huge home of brick and mortar, several kreee-kreeeing Killdeer pulled me back to the here and now, and I walked on.

I walked on, but that Killdeer family and the nothing they left behind had touched me. Since that day, I see the Killdeer with a different eye—and listen with a different ear. The bird still destroys silence, still screams “It sure is quiet here, isn’t it!?” But beneath the noise, I now see virtue (do I dare call it that?), quietly displayed for anyone who pays attention. An example of living lightly on this earth.

I stepped more lightly through the field that day, and every day thereafter.

N.B: All photos were taken at a discrete distance from the nest.

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights and photography of Chicago birder, Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.