PLOVER, the name given to an indefinite group of birds which, with the snipes and sandpipers, form the group Limicolae or "waders," although the plovers themselves rarely enter water. Perhaps the best entitled to the name are the golden plover (Cha radrius pluvialis) and the grey plover (Squatarola helvetica). The latter is the larger and lacks the hind toe ; otherwise the two forms are very similar. The grey plover breeds in the far north of America, Asia, and Europe, migrating south in the winter, when it reaches the Cape, Australia, and Ceylon. The golden plover is more local but ranges from Iceland to Siberia, including the Brit ish Isles, as a breeding species. It also migrates south in winter. Both forms are exceedingly wary. In America occur two further golden plovers, breeding in the far north, where, in Alaska, their ranges are scarcely 100 miles apart. But whereas the eastern form winters in Patagonia, which it reaches via Labrador, Newfound land, and the Antilles, returning by way of Panama, the Pacific bird winters in the Low Archipelago (see Coward's Migration of Birds). Plovers are gregarious but monogamous birds, partial to
mud-flats and marshes and eating worms and small arthropods and molluscs. The legs are long, the bill shorter than in most waders.
The ringed plovers include the shore-haunting British bird of that name; killdeer (q.v.) ; zick-zack (Hoplopterus spinosus), celebrated for its connection with the crocodile, from the mouth of which it picks leeches and other parasites, besides, from its wariness, acting as a sentinel to the reptile. The coursers, Cur sorius and allied genera, to which the last belongs, are mainly desert forms from Africa and India. Other allies of the plovers are the stone curlews (see CURLEW), lapwings (q.v.), oyster catchers (q.v.), turnstones (q.v.), and avocets (q.v.). (For "plovers' eggs" see LAPWING.)