TERRITORY IN THE LITTLE RINGED PLOVER CHARADRIUS DUBIUS.

Abstract

Summary.Comparisons are made between the territorial behaviour of a small population of Little Ringed Plovers near Reading, Berkshire, and Dutch birds (Sluiters 1938).Most birds arrived singly in spring, males preceding females from about 1–3 weeks as a rule, but some were already paired on arrival. Each pair, and also the few unpaired males, remained in territory more or less throughout their stay, defending it most intensely before egg‐laying and less afterwards. Locally, a good deal of feeding was done in the territory but in Holland only a little at best. The birds paired‐up, “courted” and incubated within the territory and most local plovers also remained there with the chicks. In Holland, many pairs deserted the territory for the feeding grounds after the hatch. This difference is linked with the feeding possibilities of the territory, usually good locally, where most territories had much surface water, but poor in Holland. Re‐directed territorial attacks (mainly aerial) are quite frequent against non‐related species. More significant, the Little Ringed Plover, the Ringed Ch. hiaticula and the Kentish Ch. alexandrinus regularly defend territories against each other.The only function of territorial behaviour at all obvious is that spacing‐out the available pairs of all three plover species present at any one site reduces the danger of a wide‐spread predation of the nests.