A few weeks ago, before school was over for the year, we were over at our local high school and heard the high, loud, and insistent “kill-deer, kill-deer, kill-deer” calls of an appropriately named bird, the killdeer. Further investigation found the bird back behind the school in the parking lot between the tennis courts and the baseball field. This parent bird was calling so vociferously because it was trying to protect the tiny downy young there with her. Later that day the music director told us more about the school’s killdeer saga.

It turns out that the killdeer had decided to lay its eggs (four of them) on the flat, gravel roof of the building—a spot certainly safe from mammalian predators or human disturbance. But killdeer young are precocial, meaning they hatch fully covered with down and able to leave the nest immediately to begin feeding on their own. After the killdeer’s family had hatched, she needed to get them to greener pastures where the nestlings could find the small insects they require for food. The meant the mama killdeer had to lead her young off the roof and hope that they could survive the fall to the ground. We saw two baby killdeer with her that had successfully made the jump, but the music director showed us the crumpled body of a third that was found outside the band room door. It was a tough biology lesson for the music students to witness.

Killdeer are members of the plover family, along with birds like the piping plover, black-bellied plover, and the semipalmated plover, which looks a bit like a small version of the killdeer except with one black breast band instead of two. The killdeer is unusual because its breeding range extends over virtually the entire North American continent except for northern Canada. It can utilize almost any dry gravelly spot for nesting and can feed on lawns, soccer fields, and open agricultural fields as well as around the edges of wetlands, lakes, rivers, and ocean. The female lays four eggs (occasionally more) in a shallow depression on the ground; both the male and female incubate the eggs for three to four weeks—the long incubation allows the chick to hatch ready to move and feed itself.

Killdeer populations have declined by nearly 40 percent over the last 50 years in the U.S. and Canada but are still one of the most widespread among the plovers. Their piping plover cousins that nest on the beaches of southern Maine are threatened but through dedicated conservation work throughout their range, the Atlantic Coast populations have increased three-fold over the last few decades. Another killdeer cousin, the American golden-plover, was once so common that market hunters in the late 1800s and early 1900s would shoot them by the hundreds during fall migration along the coasts of New England and the Maritimes and ship them to big city restaurants and markets for sale. Their numbers have never fully recovered from that period but are reasonably secure and can once again be seen in small numbers along the Maine coast during fall migration.

Fortunately, because killdeer don’t form large flocks, they have not had to endure large-scale market hunting. But as we saw in the school parking lot, they have other obstacles, sometimes as high as a school roof.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”