Birdpass
English
Collared Pratincole

Collared Pratincole

Glareola pratincola

Identify the Collared Pratincole by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

  • Download on the App Store
  • Get it on Google Play

The Collared Pratincole is a slender, long-winged wader with a deeply forked tail and chestnut underwings. It favours open country near water and is most often seen in the air, catching insects with the agility of a swallow. It breeds in warm parts of southern Europe, south-western Asia and Africa and winters in tropical Africa.

Did you know?

  • Linnaeus first classified it with the swallows, a nod to its aerial lifestyle.
  • Its genus name, Glareola, means “little gravel”, after its stony nesting ground.

About the species

Identification

Grey-brown back and head, pale belly and brown wings with darker flight feathers. The underwing is chestnut, which separates it from Black-winged Pratincole, and a narrow white trailing edge shows on the wing. The legs are short, the wings long and the tail deeply forked; the bill is unusually short for a wader. The pale throat is bordered by a black line.

Family

Glareolidae

Size

Medium (thrush)

Colours

brown, white, black, orange

About the habitat

Open landscapes near water – meadows, floodplains, saltpans and lake shores – with bare, sandy or gravelly ground for nesting.

Diet

Mainly flying insects caught in swift, agile flight; also insects taken on the ground.

Behaviour

A fast, graceful flier, often most active near water in the evening. It breeds in colonies in shallow scrapes on open ground; both parents incubate, and the precocial young leave the nest within a few days and fledge after about a month.

Sources

Photo: ferran pestañauploaded by benjli, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glareola pratincola on ground.jpg

Text: Wikipedia (English) + GBIF regional observations + Wikipedia (English), CC BY-SA 4.0; GBIF occurrence data; Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collared_pratincole

See also