The Steppe Lark (Dzhurbay) is a small bird, which is a wonderful singer. Moreover, in most cases they are painted in clay-gray dull tones. Birds are widespread, mainly inhabiting open areas: steppes and meadows, treeless slopes and semi-deserts of hills and mountains. They very rarely plant on branches of bushes and trees. The basis of their diet in the summer is mainly semi-mature seeds of all kinds of herbaceous plants and insects. In winter, they feed on seeds.
Field signs
The Steppe Lark is a large bird the size of a starling. Her figure is massive, stocky. The outfit is “lark”, for each side of the goiter there is a large black spot, sometimes they close. The bottom of the bird is slightly spotted, white. The wings are wide with a dark lining, while the trailing edge with a light border is especially clearly visible during take-off. The beak is light, thick.
It is found in the fields and steppes. Sometimes she sings while sitting on a bush or on the ground, but mostly - flying at an altitude of 10 meters, gently rises upward, describing arcs. The song is sonorous and complex. In it you can hear the sonorous “chrrr”, as well as the whistling, clear “clear”. He imitates the voices of some other birds: the swallow, other larks, linnet, warbler, badger, gopher whistle, herbalist, and various other sounds.
Coloring
The steppe lark has a basic brownish-gray hue. The rear of the neck, shoulders and front of the back have feathers with dark barrels and light buffy borders.
Dark nastvolya in naduhvost very weakly expressed. Covering small wings are grayish-brown in color, large and medium - dark brown, in the young feathery buffy or pale reddish rims. Minor flywheel ends with bright, almost white spots. Steering extreme whites with internal bases were brown in color; on the edge of the second pair with white wide borders, all the others with white small spots; all middle pairs are brown, one-color.
The ventral side of the bird is white. The lateral parts of the head are grayish-brown; above the eyes there is a light eyebrow. On a large black spot on the sides of the goiter. The main part of the chest and goiter with dark brown as well as grayish streaks. Gray sides, as well as underwing, only in the last there are white borders. Light brown rainbow. Paws and beak pale brown.
Habitat
The herbivorous lark of the steppe lives, as the name implies, in open steppe spaces, on which there is a well-developed grass cover.
Birds live in the following countries: Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Algeria, Bulgaria, Afghanistan, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Georgia, Jordan, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Spain, Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, Portugal, Palestine, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Syria, Tunisia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Croatia, France, Montenegro.
Food
Like all other larks, in the summer, the steppe lark eats exclusively animal food. He feeds, quickly running on the ground, and also pecking everything that he comes across on the grass and the ground. Sometimes he flutters and inspects the tops of all the bushes. Its large beak is often densely covered with mud. This is due to the fact that it extracts small insect larvae from the soil. With his beak, he can also break through the icy crust of snow, while from under it to extract grass seeds.
Steppe Lark omnivorous. He eats large insects - copra, locusts, procrastinates, etc. Of the remaining insects, it prefers black beetles, weevils, grains, leaf beetles, deer, bread beetles, as well as riders, flies, bees, wasps, ants and others. In addition, spiders are also a favorite delicacy of the bird of the steppe lark. Its nutrition, as we see, is very diverse. More than the rest, he eats orthoptera, since their composition is more diverse. At the same time, it eats little bugs, lamellae, leaf beetles, caterpillars and ants.
Breeding
Current flight and singing lasts from March to mid-July. At the same time, the first masonry was noted under Zhdanov Borovikov at the end of March. Clutches are also found until mid-June.
Like other larks, the nest arranges grass under the bush in the pit, perfectly obscures and disguises. It is built from dry leaves of cereals and stems, as well as thin roots. As usual, the inner layer includes thinner materials. Periodically, it is located in a pile of dry horse droppings. In the clutch there can be mainly 5 eggs, sometimes 6 pieces. The eggs are quite dark, greenish or off-white in color with a variety of olive or brownish, slightly blurry spots that are condensed to a blunt end.
One female hatches eggs for sixteen days. In this case, feeding in the nest lasts about ten days.
Chicks that have just left the nest are found from mid-May to July, when nomadic decent flocks already appear, which feed on the stubble, steppes, roads and mowing along with the rest of the early larks. In late summer, there are huge flocks of birds - from 200 individuals. Nomads thus continue until late autumn. Often they add up in the autumn real span. Such flocks can be found in the south of the range. Nomadic flocks in the fall are very noisy. At the same time, larks in good weather sing and take off, like in spring, with a song.
Molting
In adult larks, as in the rest, molting occurs only once a year, around August. The chicks have an underdeveloped down cover, which in the nest is replaced by the first plumage, which in turn is replaced by the first “adult”, serious outfit by the fall.
