The Eurasian Dotterel (Charadrius morinellus) is a mountain wader with famously reversed sex roles: the female is the more brightly coloured and dominant sex, while the male alone incubates the eggs and raises the young. In breeding plumage the bird shows a rust-red breast and blackish belly separated from the grey upper breast by a narrow white band, greyish-brown upperparts, and a bold white eyebrow stripe that runs back and meets in a V at the nape. The female is generally more robust and more strongly coloured than the paler male, while outside the breeding season both sexes become much plainer greyish-brown. It measures 20-22 cm with a wingspan of roughly 57-64 cm.
A fairly quiet bird, it gives a soft, chirping, faintly whistled "peep-peep" or a short trill, mainly during display and when alarmed near the nest, and the call does not carry far across the open fell. Eurasian Dotterels breed on the bare high mountain heaths of the Swedish mountain range, generally above the treeline at elevations around or above 900 m, with a national population fluctuating between a few thousand and roughly 15,000 pairs. After the female lays a clutch of usually three eggs in a simple ground scrape, the male incubates alone for three to four weeks and then tends the precocial chicks, while the female may go on to find another mate and lay again. Feeding on insects and other invertebrates picked from the fell heath, beetles, flies and their larvae among the most common prey, the species forages with the short-run-and-peck technique typical of plovers. Classed as Near Threatened in Sweden partly because a warming climate is shrinking the bare mountain habitat it depends on, it is a long-distance migrant wintering in North Africa and the Middle East.
Read about this species in Swedish →