The Sandgrouse represent a very unique set of birds that can only be found in Eurasia and Africa. How these birds relate to other groups of birds has been subject to fierce debates from centuries ago. Basically, they can aptly be described as ground feeding birds which colonize deserts, scrubs and grasslands. Classification guru, a Swedish scientist called Linnaeus, initially classified the Sandgrouse in the same genus with European grouse. This is because of their marked similarities. They have feathered tarsi.

Sandgrouse have beautifully decorated upperparts that also serve to camouflage it from its predators when in its pink and white rocky habitat. However, Sandgrouse shares many similarities with the pigeons. These are seen in their long wings as well as their penchant to make long flights daily between the breeding and or feeding grounds, and also pools of water from which they drink from.

Some of the plumage and the musculature of the Sandgrouse are pigeon-like, but due to the 1867 review of their skeletons by Thomas Huxley, it was concluded that they were perfectly balanced, upon which he assigned them their distinct order of Pteroclomorphae.

With time though, this idea that they were related with grouse at all was slowly forgotten and by the middle of the 200th century, many scientists began treating them as a suborder of the pigeons.

However, all this was to change when, in 1967, G L MacLean proposed a correlation between Sandgrouse and the Shorebirds. This was based essentially on the observations carried out in the field between the two birds. Several dissimilarities were then found between them. The Sandgrouse does not drink in the same way as pigeons. The facts that they are not known to build stick nests, have eggs that are pigmented and not white like pigeon’s and that their young ones can fend for themselves are among the key factors that suggest they are not closely linked to the pigeons after all. To add more weight to this school of thought, a DNA and other biochemical tests confirm that the Sandgrouse is more closely related to waders in the Charadriformes.

Sandgrouse have one important feature- their ability to make long flights in the deserts and semi deserts in search of water. While they drink water from such holes; more importantly, they wet their bellies to carry water to their young ones during their breeding season. The bellies of the male ones are especially adapted and can carry up to 15-20 milliliters of water. The eggs that they lay, which are spotted and round, are usually three in number and are laid in shallow depressions or ground nests. The incubation period takes 23 to 28 days in which both birds sit on the eggs after which the young ones get out of the nest at the end of the hatching. The parent bird feeds the newly hatched birds by regurgitation.

Sandgrouse belong to the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertabreta and are in class Aves. They belong in the order Columbiformes and in the family of Pteroclidae in the animal Kingdom.