Ringed Plover
In the fight for survival, this beach-midget lives on its nerves and employs some cunning tricks to stay one step ahead of hazards
Dominic Couzens on this beachmidget’s cunning fight for survival
It’s a big world out there if you’re a Ringed Plover. It’s probably worse if you’re a Little Ringed Plover, but either way, if you aren’t much bigger than a Bullfinch (17-19cm), you don’t have a lot of clout. And while a Bullfinch can hide its nest away in the verdant depths of the summer leaf explosion, the Ringed Plover must make do with open, exposed sites such as beaches, gravel banks, saltmarshes and fields for its terrifyingly vulnerable clutch of four. On the mean shingle streets or trampled fields, it must somehow run the gauntlet of hazards, from benign but clumsy sheep to benign but clumsy, beach-going humans, with beach balls and kites and lost children and litter. There is also a raft of frightening, malign terrors to cope with, from gulls and skuas, to dogs and foxes. A breeding Ringed Plover must endure the full gamut of air-strikes and foot patrols, all of them dangerous and threatening. It must live on its nerves.
Disruptive camouflage
It also lives on its wits. When you are small and ground-dwelling, you need to be cunning to survive. When you have nothing threatening to offer of your own, you must nullify the threats of others. And the Ringed Plover does this in multifarious ways.
In an uneven world, it can be sensible to disappear. If you look in a field guide or book with bird pictures, in which the subject is enhanced, the Ringed Plover, with its bold black-and-white markings on the head and chest and its orange-yellow bill and legs, looks impossible to miss. But if it remains still, in its haphazard realm of higgledy-piggledy stones, weed, flotsam and sand, its body shape – which is the main cue for a predator – becomes unclear. It is called disruptive camouflage; the expected outline is disrupted and becomes confusing.
Of course, if a Ringed Plover was brilliant iridescent red and blue, the disruptive camouflage would struggle to work. But it isn’t, of course. The bird is sandy-brown on its back, and that melts into the substrate. If it crouches, the bird can be completely overlooked. At the same time, the Ringed Plover’s eggs are simply impossible to detect against their background, pale brown with highly variable dark-brown spots and speckles. When a Ringed Plover nest is approached by a predator, the adults tend not to rush over to cover the eggs – their camouflage is much more effective in its own right.
The same applies to the chicks, which are also protectively patterned. If they crouch, their brown back peppered with darker markings disappears into the landscape. And then it is down to the parents’ vigilance and their own discipline. The parents give a warning call and the chicks stop, crouch and remain still. There is no room for youth tantrums and headstrong independence. These youngsters do as they are told.
With a little help from friends
So, to hide is to abide, and many a Ringed Plover can make it through a breeding season simply by trying to be as invisible as possible. But concealment is not the only strategy for the vulnerable beach-midget. Another strategy is to get by with a little help from your ‘friends’.
Of course, they aren’t friends really; they aren’t even colleagues. But Ringed Plovers, along with many other of the smaller waders that run the same ground-nesting gauntlet, do have a tendency to choose their neighbours carefully. And that doesn’t mean that Ringed Plovers are hoping for a peaceful and quiet life, where nobody mows early on a Sunday morning and nobody parties beyond midnight. On the contrary, Ringed Plovers seek the noisiest, most annoying and unpleasant characters they possibly can, to share their space. Even predators are sensitive to the reputation of a neighbourhood.
Can you imagine living next to a pair or two of Oystercatchers? Oystercatchers have two settings: loud and ear-splitting. They are black-and-white, not neutral and haven’t got a subtle bone in their body. Even birdwatchers frequently wish Oystercatchers would shut up. Meanwhile, Redshanks aren’t much better in terms of tiresome loquacity and, for all their good
looks, Avocets sound and act like football hooligans. Lapwings have more style, but they have a real gift for shifting serendipitous sheep. Common Terns have noise and aggression, and they come in useful packages known as colonies. A Ringed Plover never gets in the way of a good melee. Irritation and disturbance are useful bedfellows.
Of course, sometimes, bad manners aren’t enough. Sometimes, a predator is too determined, or tone-deaf, to be put off. On such occasions, the only option for a diminutive breeding Ringed Plover is to use guile.
You might be surprised to learn that these birds use clever tactics. But prepare to be astonished. The number of ruses they can bring out from their box of tricks is truly remarkable.
For example, imagine that a dangerous predator has approached your nest, and everything you have worked so hard for in the breeding season is suddenly under existential threat. You and I would surely panic. But what does a Ringed Plover do? Well, one thing is to pretend that you are immersed in something, busy and unguarded. It’s like those times that you or I might whistle innocently, while trying to conceal some mishap of which we are guilty. In the Ringed Plover’s repertoire of deceptions, this is called the ‘Busy Bird Ruse’.
Another favourite is ‘Mock Brooding’. This one is simple enough. At the approach of a predator, the plover simply runs away from the real nest, squats down and pretends that it is incubating elsewhere. It is simple, but the birds wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work, sometimes.
Putting on an act
The most famous of the deceptions that many waders use is to pretend to be injured. Ringed Plovers are so good at this that they really should earn an Equity Card. They lay it on thick, like visitors to doctors’ surgeries that are really only there for the attention. They lift their wing, with its striking white bar, up in the air, as if they were putting their hand up to answer a question, and at the same time they shuffle along the ground, giving the impression of being seriously impeded by injury. At times they appear to be dragging their stricken bodies, barely able to run or walk, making themselves a target that is often too tempting to resist. One might think that a predator might learn one day that it was being deceived; presumably, though, it would be equally foolish to miss such an opportunity.
Another fantastic ruse is to pretend to be a rodent. On the tundra, where most Ringed Plovers live (our breeding birds are among the most southerly in the world), voles and lemmings are an important food source. Several waders, including Ringed Plovers, have evolved a distraction-lure technique that is effectively an impersonation of a rodent, crouching down with head held in, pretending to creep like a mammal and aping its haphazard way of moving.
To our eyes it is remarkably effective, and it is performed in full sight of the intruder. A rodent, of course, cannot fly, so a predator can be lured well away from the nest chasing its false meal.
Evolving to act like a rodent might seem to be a highly extreme form of trying to protect your eggs or nests, but this only goes to show what an extreme stage the Ringed Plover lives upon. All its world is gravel and shingle, and upon it the bird plays a blinder. It might be a small bird it its own world, but it is certainly the master of it.