The Eurasian stone-curlew, Eurasian thick-knee, or simply stone-curlew (Burhinus oedicnemus) is a northern species of the Burhinidae (stone-curlew) bird family.
Taxonomy
The Eurasian stone-curlew was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Charadrius oedicnemus. He specified the locality as England. The name Oedicnemus had been used earlier by the French naturalist Pierre Belon in 1655. The species is now placed in the genus Burhinus that was introduced by the German zoologist Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger in 1811. The genus name combines the Greek ' meaning "ox" with ' meaning "nose". The species name oedicnemus combines the Greek meaning "to swell", and meaning "shin" or "leg", referring to the bird's prominent tibiotarsal joints, which also give it the common name of "thick-knee". This is an abbreviated form of Thomas Pennant's 1776 coinage "thick-kneed bustard".
The name "stone curlew" was recorded by Francis Willughby in 1678 as a "third sort of Godwit, which in Cornwall they call the Stone-Curlew, differing from the precedent in that it hath a much shorter and slenderer Bill than either of them". It derives from the bird's nocturnal calls sounding like the only distantly related Eurasian curlew Numenius arquata and its preference for barren stony heaths.
Five subspecies are recognised:
Description
The Eurasian stone-curlew is a fairly large wader, though mid-sized by the standards of its family. Length ranges from , wingspan from and weight from .
Status
Although the International Union for Conservation of Nature currently categorizes the Eurasian stone-curlew as a least-concern species,
References
Sources
External links
- Ageing and sexing (PDF; 4.7 MB) by Javier Blasco-Zumeta & Gerd-Michael Heinze