Shore plover
species of bird
The shore plover (Māori: tūturuatu, Moriori: tchūriwat', Thinornis novaeseelandiae), also known as the shore dotterel, is a small plover endemic to New Zealand. Once found all around the New Zealand coast, it is now restricted to a few offshore islands. It is one of the world's rarest shorebirds, with a population of roughly 250.
Taxonomy
The shore plover was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the plovers in the genus Charadrius and coined the binomial name Charadrius novaeseelandiae. Gmelin based his description on the "New Zealand plover" that had been described and illustrated in 1785 by the English ornithologist John Latham in his A General Synopsis of Birds. The species had been collected near Queen Charlotte Sound. In the late 20th century the shore plover was moved from the original genus Charadrius to its own genus Thinornis, along with the hooded plover later in the early 2000s. A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2015 found that Thinornis was sister to the genus Charadrius. This was confirmed by another study published in 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shore plover” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.