The Strange, Sleepless, Tweaked-Out World of the Killdeer

By Mel Carriere

Image from:   http://www.urbanwildlifeguide.net/2011/08/killdeer.html

The killdeer is the "tweaker" of the bird world.  They never sleep, you can hear their incessant, fidgety, bone rattling, screeching complaints at all hours of the day or night, and they seem to be everywhere at once.  I have seen a killdeer under a street lamp on my block, I have frequently come across them in shopping center parking lots, they frequent public and corporate business parks, they are quite at home on school campuses, and I have also found them in natural settings on the muddy fringes of San Diego Bay and in salt marshes.  There doesn't seem to be any place relatively flat that is not on the killdeer real estate wish list.

All this, and a lot of folks don't even know that they exist.  This became clear last night as my wife and  I accompanied my son to the bank and could hear the harsh alarm bells of disturbed killdeer going off all around us.

"What is that?" my wife asked me.

"Those are killdeer," I said.

"Why killdeer?  Can they really kill deer?" she continued, asking the number one answer on Family Feud in response to the question "What do people say after you tell them the bird they hear is a killdeer?"

"Of course they can't," I said.  "They call them that because the noise they make is supposed to sound like Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer."  It doesn't sound anything like that, really, so maybe the real origin of the name is because this little bird has delusions of grandeur, or perhaps it has managed to run grazing multi-point bucks away from its ground nest in the past using its broken wing display, fostering the myth that it lured the deer off Pied Piper like to their doom.

The bird's ambulatory style also lends credence to the tweaker hypothesis.  Killdeer tweak their way across parking lots, meadows, and lawns, stopping and starting at intervals as if the highly taut spring within them needs to be rewound before resuming.  Then at the slightest facial twitch or groin scratch of a passerby they will launch into flight and loudly proclaim their outrage with the loud, klaxson call that theoretically gives the bird its name.

Because I've done overnight security jobs where the Killdeer in the area never seem to put on their stocking caps and go to bed, but instead spend the entire interval between dawn and dusk fleeing from their own shadows beneath street lights, I was deeply interested in the sleep patterns of these birds.  So I did a lot of researching around on the Internet and surprisingly enough, the insomnia associated with the Killdeer species turns out to be a real problem, not so much for the birds as the human inhabitants of wherever they live, who are often rudely awakened at 3 AM by what they think is the nerve fraying wail of a neighbor's car alarm, but is actually only a family of killdeer fleeing from the terror of a passing moth or a bouncing bunny rabbit.  Internet chat rooms are full of complaints on this score.  One Killdeer complainer says:

"Killdeer, the little plover looking birds... what the heck are they doing making so much noise at night? Sheesh, the last 3 nights they've been flying around chattering their heads off at like 3:30 am. Anyone else have noisy killdeer? GO TO SLEEP! ROOST! Aargh!"

This comment generated a lot of responses, so it is apparent that the sleeplessness of Killdeer is definitely not something confined to my neighborhood.

The next time you see these little winged tweakers stutter stepping across your driveway, offer a glass of warm milk, or better yet a nightcap.  This bird with its apparently taped open eyelids seems like it should be collapsing from exhaustion at any minute, but instead there it is, orbiting around you or trying to lure you off the edge of a cliff with that bogus broken wing act.  You're not much bigger than a young buck, young man, so mind your manners around these tweaker Killdeer.  Remember, they never sleep.


Birds by Mel is powered for flight by copious quantities of warbler friendly coffee, which is not cheep, as the warblers say when they are not warbling.  Although I am not responsible for my ad content, I invite you to investigate what these sponsors have to say, unless you find them completely morally repugnant


Mel's latest on hub pages about corruption, deception and disillusionment in the "Gilded" State.