UPLAND PLOVER 61 



Adults have a complete postnuptial molt, beginning with the body 

 plumage in August and ending with the wings in December and 

 January. Their prenuptial molt in spring involves nearly every- 

 thing but the wings. The winter plumage is less buffy than the 

 spring, more grayish above and whiter below, with paler edgings, 

 but the color pattern is about the same. 



Food. — The feeding habits of the upland plover are almost wholly 

 beneficial. It is one of our most useful birds; living, as it does, in 

 grass lands and cultivated fields, it destroys vast numbers of grass- 

 hoppers, locusts, and other injurious insects. W. L. McAtee (1912) 

 writes : 



From its habits the upland plover would naturally be expected to have a 

 closer relation to agriculture thau most sandpipers, and such proves to be the 

 case. Almost half its food is made up of grasshoppers, crickets, and weevils, 

 all of which exact heavy toll from cultivated crops. Among the weevils eaten 

 are the cottonboll weevil ; greater and lesser clover-leaf weevils ; clover-root 

 weevils; Epicaerus imbricatus, which is known to attack almost all garden 

 and orchard crops ; cowpea curculios ; Tanj/mecus confertus, an enemy of sugar 

 beets ; Thecesternus liumeralis, which has been known to injure grapevines ; 

 and bill bugs. Thecesternus alone composes 3.65 per cent of the seasonal food 

 of the 163 stomachs examined, and bill bugs constitute 5.83 per cent. No fewer 

 than 8 species of bill bugs were identified from the stomachs. These weevils 

 injure, often seriously, such crops as corn, wheat, barley, and rye, as well as 

 forage plants of many kinds. The upland plover further makes itself useful to 

 the farmer by devouring leaf beetles, including the grapevine colaspis, southern 

 corn leaf-beetle, and other injurious species ; wireworms and their adult forms, 

 the click beetles ; white grubs and their parents, the May beetles ; cutworms, 

 army worms ; cotton worms ; cotton cutworms ; sawfly larvae ; and leather- 

 jackets or cranefly larvae. They befriend cattle by eating horseflies and their 

 larvae, and cattle ticks. They eat a variety of other animal forms, such as 

 moths, ants, and other Hymenoptera, flies, bugs, centipedes and millipeds, spiders, 

 snails, and earthworms. Practically 97 per cent of the food consists of animal 

 matter, chiefly of injurious and neutral forms. The vegetable food comprises 

 the seeds of such weed pests as buttonweed, foxtail grass, and sand spurs, 

 and hence is also to the credit of the bird. 



J. M. Bates (1907) says that, in Nebraska, "after the wheat is cut, 

 and during migration, it frequents the wheat stubble and gorges 

 itself with the waste grain." He has also seen it in the rye stubble in 

 Connecticut. But this does no harm, of course. 



Behavior. — ^When traveling the upland plover's flight is swift and 

 strong, well sustained on its long, pointed wings; and when migrat- 

 ing, by day or by night, it flies at a great height. In the autumn it is 

 wary and difficult to approach, as it jumps up at long range and flies 

 rapidly away for a long distance. But in the spring its flight is 

 quite different, more leisurely; it seems to drift along so high up in 

 the sky as to be almost invisible; it might pass unnoticed, were it 



