Plover
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Plover. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
pluv'er, a family of birds allied to the snipe. The plover has a shorter bill and is less strictly a shore bird. There are a hundred species, of which eight are North American. The noisy, restless killdeer, so called from its shrill cry of kill dee, kill dee, is a familiar bird in the vicinity of ponds. It may be known by a white and a black ring around its neck and a white band and a black band across its breast. The semi-palmated plover or ringneck frequents salt beaches. Chapman says: At noonday, when the heat waves are dancing over the marshes and even the twittering oxeyes are silent, one may hear the cool, pure notes of this little plover. Even a whistled imitation of them takes me to the beaches. The upland plover is about twelve inches in length. It lives in pastures or on dry prairies, and may be recognized by a trait of holding or stretching its long wings straight up above the back when it lights, "as if to get the wrinkles out before gently folding them." See Snipe ; Sandpiper
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the common English name of several wading birds; specifically, the golden yellow, or green plover, Charadrius pluvialis. In winter the old male has all the upper parts sooty-black, with large golden-yellow spots on the margin of the backs of the feathers, the sides of the head, neck, and breast with ashybrown and yellowish spots, the throat and lower parts white, the quills black. whence The summer plumage of the upper parts front and sides of the deep black, the great black and neck pure white, with parts mostly deep yellow spots. Lower about 10 inches. Its black. Length of the ground, is nest, in a depression dry fibers and stems of made of a few are highly esgrass; the eggs, which , are four in number teemed as delicacies , oil-green, with large cream yellow or GOLDEN PLOVER blotches of umber-brown. Plovers are and have a wide gregarious in habit, The gray plover is geographical range. cinerea. Squatarola
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The birds themselves are still much as Aiton's described in 1910 and Collier's in 1921, but the names and the boundaries of the family have shifted. The "upland plover" of Aiton's is no longer counted a plover at all: it is the upland sandpiper, Bartramia longicauda, and Collier's gray plover, "Squatarola cinerea," is now Pluvialis squatarola, the black-bellied plover of American usage. The golden plover has been split into three species — European, Pacific and American — with the American bird (Pluvialis dominica) recognized as distinct, and the true plover family Charadriidae is reckoned at roughly seventy species rather than the hundred Aiton's claimed. What neither account could foresee is protection: the market gunning that thinned golden plover flocks was ended by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the piping plover has since been listed as endangered and threatened in the United States, its nesting beaches roped off each summer.
Written for this edition, 2026.