Cool Critters: Killdeer – the champion of fakers – appearing in a field or parking lot near you

You never forget your first killdeer.

Perhaps you heard its shrill and incessant “kill-deer” call for which the bird is named. Or you saw it fake an injury as it limped across a gravel parking lot. Then you might have wondered, what’s a stilt-legged shorebird doing in a parking lot?

Now is the time to start looking out for this quirky trickster bird. The killdeer is among the first springtime avian migrants to Eastern Washington, usually arriving early to mid-March, said wildlife biologist Mark Vekasy of the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“They’re very common in our region and fascinating to encounter,” he said.

Vekasy encountered his first killdeer not as a scientist but as a child playing in a field.

“All these years later, I remember it clearly,” said Vekasy, who spotted a leggy bird slightly larger than a robin with striking black bands circling its chest and forehead. As the curious boy drew closer, the bird fluttered, made a strange two-note wailing sound and began limping away while dragging a wing along the ground.

“I thought it was hurt, that it had broken a wing,” Vekasy recalled. “I was concerned, so I followed but it kept moving away.”

Then, suddenly – if not miraculously – the bird burst into the air on strong, sturdy wings.

It was all a ruse. The bird succeeded in luring an unsuspecting Vekasy away from its nest located in a shallow depression on the ground. After taking flight, it circled around and eventually returned to the nest.

“Even as a kid, I realized the bird had tricked me,” he said. “I was fascinated.”

Killdeer are often found on open ground such as fields, pastures, parks and even gravel parking lots and roads. Why areas with gravel? The pebbles and stones help camouflage the female’s small, speckled eggs and later, her buff-colored chicks, according to the National Audubon Society.

As shorebirds, they’ll hang out around shallow bodies of water, but they’re just as at home among farmland and human-altered landscapes, Vekasy explained. When they forage for insects, they look like they have the hiccups, moving in fits and starts while bobbing their heads up and down.

Although other ground-nesting birds are known to feign injury to protect their exposed nests from intruders, the killdeer’s behavior is among the most dramatic, researchers have found.

“The most interesting behavior of the killdeer is its polished performance of the broken wing action,” observed ornithologist C. Douglas Deane in a 1944 paper published in “The Auk: Ornithological Advances.”

“There must be a considerable amount of training and intelligence,” he concluded.

Oftentimes, intruders are humans, fox, coyotes or skunks, Deane explained. But sometimes the interloper is a big, lumbering cow, he added. In that case, the killdeer uses a different tactic known as the “ungulate display.” The bird fans out its feathers, whips up its tail to reveal its bright orange rump and then charges at the great beast while squealing “Kill-deer! Kill-deer!”

A very surprised cow veers its path, away from the small-but-tough killdeer’s nest that holds a clutch of tiny eggs.