Killdeer 



A noisy bird in the apple tree community from spring until fall 

 is the killdeer. This well-known member of the plover family owes 

 his odd name to his penetrating call of kill-dee, kill-dee, heard at all 

 hours of the day and often during the night. 



The killdeer is a good-sized bird, about ten inches long. He is 

 grayish above, white below, with a prominent neck band of two 

 black rings; his bill is black and his eyelids are red. 



The female killdeer is a camouflage artist, adept at concealing a 

 nest that is typically little more than a slight depression in the bare 

 ground. A killdeer in our community, for example, collected an 

 assortment of pebbles from a nearby area and carried them, one by 

 one, to her nest; there she made an irregular border of pebbles, so 

 ingeniously placed that her drab, sepia-marked eggs could not be 

 seen when I was but two steps away. 



Indeed, about the only time a killdeer's nesting place is revealed is 

 when the parent bird is flushed from her nest. But then she is so 

 clever at running away and directing attention with her famous 

 "broken wing" antics that it is difficult to find the spot from which 

 she fled. 



Usually traveling in pairs, these long-legged birds gather their 

 food mostly worms and insects while running over the ground as 

 if on stilts. The enterprising mother killdeer shown in the photograph 

 actually picked up chips of stone she found near a stone house under 

 construction on my farm; one by one, she carried them to her nest. 

 When I located her nest and pointed it out to the stone masons who 

 were building the house, they chuckled and agreed that this killdeer 

 should be given a union card as a master stone mason. 



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