05. March 2025

Interesting travels of the female Kentish Plover

Our female Kentish plover, which nested in the Soča estuary in Italy in 2020 and has since returned to the Sečovlje Salina, has been spotted again in Italy.

In 2020, we were informed by the Italian Bird Ringing Centre of a sighting of a lphrat (Charadrius alexandrinus) at the mouth of the river Isonzo, wearing a white PVC ring with a black SCP code. We checked our records and discovered that Silvano Candotto had observed and photographed the female at Punta Spigola, which was captured as an adult at Fontaniggee on 29 July. On 1 and 12 July 2023 she was spotted again in front of the Saline Museum in Fontaniggee and on 27 October 2023 she was observed in Grado by the Hungarian ornithologist Andor Pálinkás. A few days ago it was reported that it was also present in Grado last year. On 4.9.2024 it was observed by Elisa Karpan, who also photographed it.

Monitoring of the Kentish Plover in the Sečovlje saltpans has been ongoing since 1983. Most observations were carried out within the framework of the former Ornithological Society Ixobrychus of Koper. The Kentish Plover was studied by T. Makovec in the 1990s. Since 2002, observations and research on this species have been conducted as part of regular weekly monitoring in the KPSS.

The Kentish Plover breeds in the area of the Sečovlje salt pans mostly in a scattered manner. A breeding colony, in which a large number of pairs nest together, is known only in the area in front of the Fontaniggee Salt Pans Museum (Makovec, 1994; Škornik, 2005).

The polygyny of the species is an interesting fact. Through ringing, it was found that almost all males had nests with several females at the same time. The success of litters with only one parent (female or male) is discussed by Székely and Cuthill (1999), who found that the reproductive success of these litters was significantly lower than that of litters in which both sexes were present. It is therefore difficult to accurately quantify the number of reproductive pairs.

The relatively high proportion of adults returning in the first calendar year is not surprising, as adult fratino are known to have greater phyllopatricity than first-year individuals, which are thought to have greater natal dispersal (Sandercock et al., 2005; Colwel et al., 2007).

Data from the Sečovlje salt pans (2007-2012) show that 10-20% of the breeding population is ‘lost’ after only two years, making observations of older individuals, such as the female SCP, extremely valuable.  However, future, more detailed and extensive demographic surveys of kentish plovers in the wider North