Betsy, I think Killdeers just about qualify for the Winners Club, the group
of plant and animal species that can coexist fairly successfully with
humans and thus will be with us well into the future. Your Killdeer makes
this point. The fact that fewer natural predators (for example foxes,
coyotes, badgers, skunks, and several kinds of snakes) are present in and
around cities actually favors ground nesters such as Killdeers, as long as
they can nest in a place that's not excessively disturbed by people and
dogs. I suspect dogs (with some exceptions) aren't bright enough to find a
Killdeer nest, so if people don't actually step on it or keep the adults
off it unendingly, it can do all right. Dogs may have a better chance of
finding the young, as they are mobile and would attract attention, but when
the young "freeze" at the parents' warning calls, they may be relatively
safe from dogs too. Killdeers nest in such open areas they probably don't
have much to fear from cats or raccoons, and--short of urban Peregrines
(parenthetically, I hope our celebrated Seattle pair never begins to prey
on our few breeding urban shorebirds!)--there are no avian predators in
town during the breeding season.

I've seen numerous successful Killdeer nests at the edges of roads and
parking lots,so cars certainly don't disturb them unduly, but people
constantly walking right by a nest would represent too much disturbance, I
imagine.

Pardon me for some philosophy, but I can't resist. There may indeed be
cause for concern about a given bird nest, and if we can maximize the
chance that it survives, that's great. However, it seems to me that those
birds that choose to be in areas of dense human populations are often well
adapted to do so. In any case, they are taking their chances, just as the
same species do every day in the wild! Probably we are going to have to
accept (whether we like it or not, and for the most part I hate it) that
dogs, cats and humans as well as raccoons, merlins, rats, etc. are the
"natural" predators on birds that live in cities. If we have cities, we'll
have kitties (I always say).

Dennis Paulson
dpaulson at ups.edu