Egyptian Plover

About the Egyptian Plover

The Egyptian plover (Pluvianus aegyptius), also known as the crocodile bird, is a wader, the only member of the genus Pluvianus. It occurs in a band across Sub-Saharan Africa from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east and south to parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite the name, it no longer occurs in Egypt. The species was formerly placed with the pratincoles and coursers in the family, Glareolidae, but is now regarded as the sole member of its own monotypic family Pluvianidae.

The species is one of several plovers doubtfully associated with the "trochilus" bird mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in a supposed cleaning symbiosis with the Nile crocodile. The Egyptian plover was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it in the genus Charadrius and coined the binomial name Charadrius aegyptius. Linnaeus based his account on the description by the Swedish naturalist Fredrik Hasselqvist that had been published in 1757. The Egyptian plover is now the only species placed in the genus Pluvianus that was introduced in 1816 by the French ornithologist Louis Vieillot... Wikipedia →