Oriental Pratincole

The Oriental pratincole, also called the grasshopper-bird or swallow-plover, has short legs, long pointed wings, a long forked tail and a short bill adapted for catching insects in the air. The back and head are brown, the wings brown with black flight feathers, the belly white and the underwing chestnut. It is very hard to tell from the collared pratincole, which also has a chestnut underwing, and the chestnut looks black unless seen well. The black-winged pratincole also has dark flight feathers but lacks a white trailing edge (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is a bird of open country and is often seen near water in the evening, hawking for insects in flight, though it can also feed on the ground. It lays two or three eggs directly on the ground. It breeds from northern Pakistan and Kashmir, sporadically south towards Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and east to Indochina, China and the Philippines, and winters across tropical Asia and northern Australia. SoIB 2023 lists it as a summer migrant in India with localized winter populations, has too little data for a trend and rates it a Low conservation priority (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).