Endangered
Shore Plover
Charadrius novaeseelandiae
The shore plover, also known as the shore dotterel, is a small plover endemic to New Zealand.
Appearance
The shore plover is about 20 cm long, brown above and white below, with a black (male) or brown (female) mask. The brown back feathers have narrow pale fringes, giving a scaly appearance at close range. There is a distinctive white strip circling its head below its brown skullcap. Its legs are bright orange-red, and the bill orange-red (brighter in males than females) with a sharply defined dark tip.
The wings are brown with a narrow white wingbar along the full length, and the tail brown with white sides.
Range and habitat
Although this species was historically found only on the New Zealand coast, subfossil shore plover bones have been recovered from roosts of the extinct laughing owl near rivers many kilometres inland. Cook's second expedition collected them from opposite ends of the South Island, in Fiordland and the Marlborough Sounds. There are 19th century reports of shore plovers from the South Island and several parts of the North Island, but by the 1870s they had vanished from the mainland, surviving only on the Chatham Islands.
Once found all around the New Zealand coast, it is now restricted to a few offshore islands. The species survived on only one island, Rangatira, in the Chatham Islands, from where it has since been reintroduced to other offshore islands, such as Mangere Island in the Chathams, Mana Island near Wellington and Motutapu near Auckland.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Shore plovers (unusually for shorebirds) nest under cover (such as driftwood and vegetation) or in burrows under boulders. In the early 1990s, the Department of Conservation (DOC) started a captive breeding programme at Pukaha / Mount Bruce National Wildlife Centre, and later at Isaac Conservation and Wildlife Trust.
In crisis
It is one of the world's rarest shorebirds, with a population of roughly 250. Shore plovers are endangered, with a global population of around 250 birds. The world population was roughly 70 breeding pairs in 1937 and their habitat was declared a reserve in 1954.
The population fluctuated in the 1980s, with only 40 breeding pairs in 1982, rising to 80 pairs in 1987 and a high of 94 pairs in 2010. A second wild population of about 20 birds was discovered in 1999 living on Western Reef off Chatham Island, but it gradually declined, and the last bird was taken into captivity in 2003.
Shore Plover is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Shore Plover, Wikidata item Q11842208. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
