Last night Kim and I went down to a training drill with the fire department to photograph it. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned this but I am on the fire department. My roles are twofold: photographer and CPR instructor.
Anyways, it was a drill on charging hose lines (filling them with water) to make sure there are no leaks, the pumps on the trucks work, and to give the firefighters opportunity to practice their skills so they don’t forget how when the time is ripe.
There’s a burned out area in the small field where the drill was. The FD often uses this field for training purposes so you could see they did a small burn there at one time. Kim was standing off to the side when all of a sudden she heard some god-awful screaching, screaming, and squaking. She looked down and saw a killdeer
Seems Kim got a little too close to Ms. Killdeer’s three eggs and protested up a storm. We back off as soon as I took the picture to leave her in peace. I then told the firefighters about the nest and threatened bodily harm to them if they disturbed Ms. Killdeer.
The 411: Their breeding habitat is open fields or lawns, often quite far from water, across most of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, with isolated populations in Costa Rica and Peru. Killdeer nest on open ground, often on gravel. They may use a slight depression in the gravel to hold the eggs, but they don’t line it at all, or line it only with a few stones. Since there is no structure to stand out from its surroundings, a killdeer nest blends marvelously into the background. Furthermore, the speckled eggs themselves look like stones.
Check out Friday Ark
Howling Hill 
Interesting post — I see killdeer around here (southern Nevada), but did not know that about their nests.