Quail-plover

Quail-plover
Conservation status
Least Concern  (IUCN 3.1)[1]
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Charadriiformes
Family:	Turnicidae
Genus:	Ortyxelos Vieillot, 1825
Species:	O. meiffrenii
Binomial name
Ortyxelos meiffrenii (Vieillot, 1819)

The quail-plover, lark buttonquail or lark-plover (Ortyxelos meiffrenii) is a small ground-living bird in the buttonquail family Turnicidae that is found in the Sahel region of Africa and in a disjunct region of East Africa. It is the only species placed in the genus Ortyxelos.^[2]

The quail-plover is a small, short-tailed cursorial bird which looks a little like a miniature courser when on the ground. The upperparts are a sandy-rufous colour and the underparts mainly whitish. They show a distinctive wing pattern in flight when the contrast between the white primary coverts and the black with white-tipped remiges to form a distinct diagonal band on the upperwing. Its fluttering flight style is rather lark-like. The females are slightly darker than the males while the juveniles are paler.^[3]

The quail-plover occurs in Sahel from southern Mauritania and northern Senegal eastwards to northern Cameroon and southern Chad^[3] into South Sudan and southern Sudan^[1] with separate populations in northern Benin and coastal Ghana,^[3] with another in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.^[4]

The quail-plover is usually found singly or in pairs in dry grassland and thorn scrub. It is rather skulking preferring to move stealthily through grass but also running around like a courser in the open. Tends to crouch down and hide when approached and flushes only when the observer is almost on top of it and then flies off with a jerky undulating flight. It breeds during the dry season and moves north ahead of the rains^[3] It tends to be more active at night and to call with a soft low whistle like the wind going through a pipe during moonlit nights.^[5]

The quail-plover has an extremely large range, its population trend is not known, the population is not understood to be undergoing a sufficiently rapid decline to approach the thresholds under the population trend criterion while the population size has not been quantified so the species is evaluated as Least Concern.^[4]