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Updated: June 23, 2025
If, after Lapwings have established themselves in their territories, the weather becomes exceptionally severe, the birds collect together again in flocks and revert to their winter routine; and under similar circumstances, Buntings fail to sing and temporarily desert their territories. In such cases it is clear that the impulse to seek isolation ceases for a time to dominate the situation.
At noontide, in the dry heat, it is pleasant to listen to the sound of water moving among the thousand thousand grass-blades of the mead. The flower-growing day lengthens out beyond the sunset, and till the hedges are dim the lapwings do not cease.
This species always expresses its glad impulse in the same way; but how different in form is this simple game of touch-who-touch-can from the triplet dances of the spur-winged lapwings, with their drumming music, pompous gestures, and military precision of movement!
Most of the birds I thus noticed while hurriedly passing through the country were, of course, the conspicuous ones. The spurred lapwings, big, tame, boldly marked plover, were everywhere; they were very noisy and active and both inquisitive and daring, and they have a very curious dance custom. No man need look for them.
You imitate him to the best of your ability, and soon, if you are lucky, an enormous flock of golden plover flash over you. Four barrels are fired almost instantaneously, and the deadly "twelve-bore" of your companion is seldom fired in vain. Green plover, or lapwings, are numerous enough on the Cotswolds. They are wonderfully difficult to circumvent, nevertheless.
"The coy potato or the onion browns, The tender steak takes on a nobler hue. I ponder 'mid the falling of the dew, And watch the lapwings circling o'er the downs. "Like portals at the pathway of the moon Two trees stand forth in pencilled silhouette Against the steel-grey sky, as black as jet The steak is ready. Ah! too soon! too soon!" Close by was a place for oats and chaff.
From their hereditary home the lapwings cannot be entirely driven away. Out of the mist comes their plaintive cry; they are hidden, and their exact locality is not to be discovered. Where winter rules most ruthlessly, where darkness is deepest in daylight, there the slender plovers stay undaunted.
Besides, it is time that the cowslip wine were made, and I will give you some bread and cheese and gingerbread for noonchin, so that you may fill your baskets in the meadows before they are laid up for grass. Mrs. Jewel will give you a drink of milk." "O let me go, sister!" pleaded Eugene. "She gives us bread and honey! And I want to hear the lapwings in the meadows cry pee-wit."
Pelicans and flamingoes, geese and ducks, storks and herons, ibises and cranes, bitterns and lapwings, flew in dark flocks of manifold forms from all directions.
For instance, half a dozen or more Lapwings can be kept in view at the same time, and as they stand at dawn in solitary state, keeping watch upon their respective territories, they are conspicuous objects on the short, frosted grass; no stranger can enter the arena without the observer being aware of it, no commotion can occur but one detects it, no movement however small need be missed.
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