Killdeer Birds in the Neighborhood

For my birthday, my sister E gave me a pair of binoculars to help aid our birdwatching as we go on neighborhood walks. The kids have liked using the binoculars, too, and I think it has made our quarantine experience a little more varied. During our morning walk yesterday morning, we noticed some birds with distinctive peeps that were running around in the housing development that is under construction at the bottom of our hill. It clearly looked like a mother bird was trying to out to her baby.

Then today we saw the same mother bird again, but she started to act really strange. She crept down, puffed out her tail feathers to look larger and revel russet-colored rump feathers underneath. For a moment, we thought she was going to come toward us! We kept walking, and it became apparent that she was trying to keep us away from her babies that were walking further down the road.

We figured out that these birds are called Killdeer, and they actually have a very distinctive sound (see video clip below). Our book describes the call as: kill-dee, kill-dee, kill-deer, but I don't really hear that.

This video of the mother bird defending her nest is a little similar to what we experienced this morning: