June is named after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth. Fittingly, it was in June last year that some egg rock lookalikes hatched in a landscape bed outside our front door.
What are egg rocks? That’s what landcapers call the small multicolored rocks, often somewhat rounded in shape, they use in beds. Unlike mulch, egg rock does not have to be refreshed annually; we just use a little mulch around the shrubs and trees in the front bed.
What are egg rock lookalikes? They are what is produced when killdeer, members of the plover family, lay eggs on or adjacent to egg rocks. (The name “killdeer” is derived from the call of these birds in flight.)
The egg rocks created a perfect camouflage for killdeer eggs. We might not have noticed the four eggs in a small mulch bed adjacent to our egg rocks but for a killdeer pair who were running around.
When we came outside, one of the pair flew away. The other ran around as though it had an injured wing. This act is supposed to lure predators away from the nest. However, we had read the killdeer playbook and were familiar with this ploy. The “injured” killdeer, after distracting the predator, will undergo a miraculous recovery and fly away.
We didn’t follow the decoy. Instead, we started looking for the nest, keeping our distance to avoid stressing out the birds or, even worse, scrambling some eggs.
The photos show both the injured wing act and the eggs. Notably missing is much of a nest. Some birds, like the tree swallows and bluebirds we have around here, nest in cavities, natural or manmade. Other birds, such as the robin, build cup nests. The killdeer simply excavates a scrape in the ground or mulch, and calls it good.
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The parents took turns incubating the eggs. The clutch of four was a normal number for this species. It was a stressful time: an agreeable neighbor saw to his cat, but we could do nothing to prevent any other animal from snacking on a killdeer chick. But in about a month all of the eggs hatched, and we had little chicks running around the front yard.
The chicks lurched around awkwardly, getting their sea legs. Each day they explored a little farther away from the nest. And then, suddenly, both parents and chicks were gone.
Not only do killdeer not make much of a nest, they don’t feed their kids either. They simply lead them to where there is food. Killdeer are meat eaters with a varied diet that may include worms and insects. We deduced that the parents had led their chicks to a more favorable food environment.
Killdeer are theoretically shorebirds, but our experience was not unique. Friends have seen killdeer nesting on their gravel driveways, and we have seen them on golf courses. The literature reports them nesting on bare soil and grass as well.
However, we have seen more killdeer in watery environments than we have seen elsewhere. Shorelines and wetlands are good places to watch for their classic movement pattern, repetitive quick dashes followed by abrupt stops. A killdeer that is not moving will be harder to spot. Like their eggs, they often blend in with their surroundings.
