Black-winged stilt
Himantopus himantopus
— Where the name comes from
Himantopus was already in Pliny and joins the Greek himás, “strap, strip of leather”, and poús, “foot”: “strap-legged”, legs thin and long as laces. The name is repeated twice in the binomial. The Italian name, “knight of Italy”, as elegant as the bird, also speaks of its tall, slender figure, but its precise origin is not documented.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Shorebirds
- Habitat
- Salt pans, lagoons, rice fields, shallow marshes
- Range
- Southern Europe, Africa, southern and central Asia
- Size
- 33–36 cm, legs up to 24 cm, 160–200 g
- Diet
- Aquatic insects, larvae, small crustaceans
- Lifespan
- Over 10 years
— Characteristics
- 01
Relative to its body it has the longest legs of any bird.
- 02
In flight its pink legs trail far beyond the tail.
- 03
It nests in colonies and attacks anyone who comes near, in a shrieking crowd.
— What sets it apart
Its legs are so long that to peck an insect off the ground it has to bend them conspicuously, like someone kneeling; in water, though, they let it feed where no other wader of its size can reach. In Italy its fortunes are tied to people: it nests in the salt pans of Sardinia, Apulia and the Po delta and in the rice fields of the Po plain, where shallow, managed water has replaced the drained marshes. Where a salt pan is abandoned and dries out, the colony moves away.
