All species › Waders, gulls and terns › Pratincoles and coursers › Cream-colored courser
Cream-colored courser
Cursorius cursor | Renvogel | Corredor sahariano
A sand-coloured desert wader with long pale legs and a habit of running rather than flying. Britain and Ireland have records going back to the eighteenth century, but the nearest breeding birds are on the eastern Canary Islands, and modern British records have become distinctly scarce.
Voice
Usually silent. Disturbed birds give a short sharp whistled kwit-kwit, sometimes repeated in flight. In display the call is a nasal whaur and a harsh frog-like praak-praak that carries a long way over bare ground.
No freely licensed recording is available for this species yet.
Identification
The whole bird is warm sandy buff, paler on the belly, with a blue-grey rear crown and nape. A black stripe runs back from the eye with a white supercilium above it, and the two meet in a sharp V on the nape. The bill is black and slightly decurved, the legs long and off-white. Perched or walking the bird shows no black at all; the moment it flies, the primaries and the entire underwing are jet black, which is the single most useful confirmation at distance.
Confusion species
At range the shape suggests a plover, but no plover combines long pale legs, a decurved black bill and head stripes meeting in a nape V. Dotterel shares the V but is shorter legged, shows a white breast band and habitually crouches, whereas a courser stands very upright, runs with the head held low and then freezes. Stone-curlew is bulkier and heavier, with a huge yellow eye, bold black-and-white wing bars, a thickened tarsal joint and a stealthy, crouched walk; it is largely crepuscular, while the courser is out running in full sun.
Habitat
Semi-desert and bare steppe: flat, sparsely vegetated ground of sand, grit or stone with at most scattered dwarf shrubs. On the eastern Canaries this means the jables, the wind-blown sand plains, together with the adjoining lava flats. The species avoids closed scrub and irrigated farmland, and feeds on foot with a short dash and a stab at beetles, ants and larvae.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds from the Canary Islands and the Sahara east through Arabia to west Pakistan and north-west India. Within Europe it breeds only on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, with a few birds on La Graciosa, and since the turn of the century in Almería on the Spanish mainland. British and Irish records span more than two centuries, the first from Kent in 1785, and typically involve single birds on coastal grassland, links and cliff-top fields in autumn.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- Migration direction
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
British birders should treat this as a bird to travel for rather than to wait for. On Fuerteventura, work the plains around Tindaya and the Llanos de la Concepción in the first two hours of daylight, scanning from the car with the sun behind you. If one does turn up at home, expect short grass rather than mud: past records come from golf links, airfields and grazed cliff tops, not from estuaries.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened, but the European population is small and confined. The first national census, in 2005 and 2006, put the Canary Island total at roughly two thousand birds, more than four fifths of them on Fuerteventura. Local pressures are the ones that matter: building and tourist infrastructure on the plains, off-road vehicles crossing the sand sheets, and disturbance by free-running dogs during the breeding season.