~:: Stalking the Killdeer ::~

When I was—what was I? In high school, I think, and spending the night at Kristin DeKuiper’s house. Her parents took us to this—umm—presentation at something like a gym, where they’d set up a projector (remember the sound a projector makes in a dark room?) and were showing a film. I don’t know why.  In the course of the film, there were several shots of sandpipers on a beach. A sandpiper is sort of a lozenge of a smallish bird on stilts, and is—like all birds—without eyebrows or any other feature that might allow any facial expression.

The only things that were moving on these water birds were their legs. Tick-tick-tick-tick, they’d make this businesslike dash down the wet sand as the water receded.  Only to do a one-eighty before they quite got to the water edge as the next wave sent a little surge of water inland and, tick-tick-tick-tck – back up to the dry sand they’d go.

No look on their faces, just these busy little legs propelling them first toward the water with fierce intent, then magically, with the same fierce intent—away, over and over again.  I thought it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.  And ever since, I have loved sandpipers.

We have seagulls (therein lies a Utah tale).  And salty lakes.  And tiny little waves that can get nasty when the wind comes up.   But we have no ocean here (surprise!), and so we have no sandpipers.

What we have instead are Killdeer.

They were once water birds.  But they rethought things and became field birds.  That’s where I first met them, in the fields behind the church, right where they finally built the school.

Killdeer look a lot like sandpipers (at least, they do to a non-birder land lubber) – the lozenge like body, the stilty legs.  And I used to stand by the field fence and watch them, tick-ticking all over that field.  They are fierce and courageous parents; when someone scary like me comes along, both parents will leap from the nest (well, only one sits there at a time, but they take turns) and, with an air of really not having been anywhere before this very moment, they walk stutteringly away from you, nest, and any previous existence – very much as though they are a little wounded, a little vulnerable, and certainly unaware that you are behind them.

In fact, if you are scary enough, and if you seem a little undecided as to whether you are interested in eating them, they will suddenly hunker down and thrash around as though a wing is broken—flashing the red underfeathers that lie beneath their sleek white, gray brown usual selves, suggesting that there might even been blood involved.

And all the time, they make a little piercing cry.  It doesn’t sound like “killdeer” to me, but it evidently did to some name-giving person once.  Of course, as you approach from behind, the dying bird manages to take a few more lurching steps, then a few more, until you are almost certainly out of range of the nest.  And then it will suddenly launch itself forward into the air, still flashing the red, still calling, to lead you even farther away.

But this is not an ornithology lesson.  It is prelude to the tale of our last month’s delighted obsession: a pair of killdeer who seemed to have chosen our field for a nesting place.  Every day when we’d go out to feed the horses, as we started down the drive to the barn, there would be the killdeer, looking a little as if she’d been caught in the middle of something, suddenly scooting across the drive in front of us, heading for the grass.

I found this puzzling.  Why, when I assumed her nest was in that nice high grass, was she always coming from my neighbor’s graveled drive and yard?  There was no grass to hide in there—Jim keeps his tiny lawn clipped with barber clippers.  And she always seem to materialize right out of the fence line.  Curiouser and curiouser.

It was G who found the nest, I think. Or was it me? And then we read about these amazing little creatures.  And now I’m going to show you what we found.