Oriental pratincole Great Britain more than once. The first record for the Western Palearctic was in Suffolk, England in June 1981. On 7 February 2004, 2.5 million oriental pratincoles were recorded on Eighty Mile Beach in Australia's north-west by the Australasian Wader Studies Group. There had previously been no records of this magnitude and it is supposed that weather conditions caused much of the world's population of this species to congregate in one area. Oriental pratincole The oriental pratincole ("Glareola maldivarum"), also known as the grasshopper-bird or swallow-plover, is a wader in the pratincole family, Glareolidae. The genus name is a diminutive
Pratincole resting in the warmest part of the day. Like the coursers, the pratincoles are found in warmer parts of the Old World, from southern Europe and Africa east through Asia to Australia. Species breeding in temperate regions are long-distance migrants. Their two to four eggs are laid on the ground in a bare scrape. The downy pratincole chicks are able to run as soon as they are hatched. The Australian pratincole, the only species not in the genus "Glareola", is more terrestrial than the other pratincoles, and may be intermediate between this group and the coursers. The name "pratincole" comes