Greater Sandplover
It is 37 years since I saw a Greater Sandplover in Britain, and that one was a dull immature bird, so I leapt at the chance when some friends offered me a lift to see this breeding-plumaged male at Redcar yesterday. I think there have been only about twenty seen in Britain since the first record in 1978. But it is difficult to be sure as some individuals wander widely, and this individual was in Aberdeenshire the day before it turned up in Redcar. It was feeding on a seaweed-strewn beach with a number of Ringed Plovers, but it was noticeably larger than those, with proportionately longer legs, and with a black face mask and orange breast band, characteristic of adult males. It breeds in desert regions north of the Himalayas from China west to the Caspian Sea, with only small numbers breeding within the Western Palearctic in central Turkey. Its odd scientific name Charadrius leschenaultii commemmorates the French traveller and naturalist Jean-Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour (1773-1826), who collected the first specimen from the south-east coast of India in 1819 and was named by René Lesson in 1826, the year of Leschenault's death.
Greater Sandplover
It is 37 years since I saw a Greater Sandplover in Britain, and that one was a dull immature bird, so I leapt at the chance when some friends offered me a lift to see this breeding-plumaged male at Redcar yesterday. I think there have been only about twenty seen in Britain since the first record in 1978. But it is difficult to be sure as some individuals wander widely, and this individual was in Aberdeenshire the day before it turned up in Redcar. It was feeding on a seaweed-strewn beach with a number of Ringed Plovers, but it was noticeably larger than those, with proportionately longer legs, and with a black face mask and orange breast band, characteristic of adult males. It breeds in desert regions north of the Himalayas from China west to the Caspian Sea, with only small numbers breeding within the Western Palearctic in central Turkey. Its odd scientific name Charadrius leschenaultii commemmorates the French traveller and naturalist Jean-Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour (1773-1826), who collected the first specimen from the south-east coast of India in 1819 and was named by René Lesson in 1826, the year of Leschenault's death.