248 Birds Every Child Should Know 
along their long route. You can usually tell 
a flock of plovers in flight by the crescent shape 
of the rapidly moving mass. 
With a busy company of friends, the killdeer 
haunts broad tracts of grassy land, near water- 
uplands or lowlands, or marshy meadows beside 
the sea. Scattered over a chosen feeding 
ground, the plovers run about nimbly, nervously, 
looking for trouble as well as food. Because 
worms, which are their favourite supper, come 
out of the ground at nightfall, the birds 
are especially active then. Grasshoppers, 
crickets, and other insects content them during 
the day. 
SEMIPALMATED PLOVER 
The killdeer, which is our commonest plover, 
has a little cousin scarcely larger than an English 
sparrow that is a miniature of himself, except 
that the semipalmated (half-webbed) or ring- 
necked plover has only one dark band across 
the upper part of his white breast, while the 
killdeer wears two black rings. This dainty 
little beach bird has brownish-gray upper parts 
so like the colour of wet sand, that, as he runs 
along over it, just in advance of the frothing 
ripples, he is in perfect harmony with his sur- 
roundings. Relying upon that fact for pro- 
