Lesser Sand-Plover

Overview

Lesser Sand-Plover: Medium-sized, chunky plover with gray upperparts, white underparts, and bright rust-brown breast band and nape. The head has gray-brown cap and thick black eyestripe broken by a white forehead. Throat is white with a black border. Bill is black and legs and feet are yellow-green.

Range and Habitat

Lesser Sand-Plover: Asian species; rare migrant on Aleutians and islands off western Alaska. Casual in summer in western and northwestern Alaska, where it has bred; accidental in eastern North America. Prefers tundra and alpine tundra for nesting; winters on coastal tidal flats, estuaries, and sandy beaches.

INTERESTING FACTS

The Lesser Sand-plover was first described by Peter Simon Pallas, a German zoologist and botanist, in 1776.
It is also known as the Mongolian Plover, the Tibetan Plover, the Mongolian Sandplover, the Mongolian Dotterel, and the Mongolian sand-dotterel.
They forage using a run-and-pause technique, rather than the steady probing of some other wader groups.
A group of plovers has many collective nouns, including a "brace", "congregation", "deceit", "ponderance" and "wing" of plovers.

The Lesser Sand-Plover is evaluated as Least Concern at this time. The prior rating of the Lesser Sand-Plover was Lower Risk. This rating was downgraded to Least Concern in 2004 as a result of the range and population of the Lesser Sand-Plover. The range of this bird species is about 1 million square kilometers. The population of the Lesser Sand-Plover is about 150,000 individual birds. At this time there are no known threats facing the Lesser Sand-Plover that could potentially endanger the range or the population of this bird species. This bird is native to most of the world.