Eurasian Thick-knee, Burhinus oedicnemus, is a species of wader in the thick-knee family found in grassland, heathland and shrub and unvegetated or sparsely vegetated land ecosystems. This species has a discontinuous breeding range in Europe, extending from southern Britain (the north-western extreme of the range) east to southern Russia and south to Spain, southern Italy, the Balkans and the Caucasus in Russia. The species inhabits lowland heath, semi-natural dry grassland, infertile agricultural grassland, steppe on poor soil, desert and extensive sand-dunes. It breeds on open, bare ground or areas with little vegetation, and has adapted to arable land but only where crops are short or have an open structure during the breeding season, such as maize, carrots, sugar beet and sunflowers; intensively grown cereals are normally too tall and dense in spring to be used (European Red List 2015).

Burhinus oedicnemus has a breeding population size of 47600-77700 pairs and a breeding range size of 840000 square kilometres in the EU27. The breeding population trend in the EU27 is Increasing in the short term and Decreasing in the long term.

The EU population status of Burhinus oedicnemus was assessed as Depleted, because the EU27 population or range declined by at least 20% since 1980, but has no longer been declining since 2001.