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Updated: June 23, 2025
In the ponds which we passed earlier in the day we saw hundreds of mallard ducks and teal. The car often frightened golden plover from their dust baths in the road, and crested lapwings flashed across the prairie like sudden storms of autumn leaves.
The parched tops of the palms, where turtle doves, lapwings and sparrow-hawks were wont to perch, were crowded with the vagabond boys of the town, who whiled away the time by pulling the withered and diseased dates from the great clumps and flinging them down on the bystanders below, till the guard took aim at them with their arrows and stopped the game.
Lapwings settle in the water meadows, and, finding themselves forestalled, pass on in search of other ground; Blackbirds arrive in a coppice or in a hedgerow and, meeting with opposition, disappear; and the Curlew, wandering with no fixed abode but apparently with a fixity of purpose, searches out the moorland where it can find the particular environmental conditions to which its inherited nature will respond.
In such places both species are often abundant; the meadow is divided up into Lapwings' territories, and early in the season the Snipe wander over it in small parties, singly, or in pairs.
The cut rye, the coarse steppe grass, the milkwort, the wild hemp, all withered from the sultry heat, turned brown and half dead, now washed by the dew and caressed by the sun, revived, to fade again. Arctic petrels flew across the road with joyful cries; marmots called to one another in the grass. Somewhere, far away to the left, lapwings uttered their plaintive notes.
Lapwings, humbugs too, but humbugs in a prettier cause, started from the shrubberies where their eggs were hidden, and fluttered lamely towards the open.
Afterwards we chatted and worked until the sun went down. This sometimes occurred so suddenly that we had to run like lapwings, from the great chestnut down to the tents, in order to scramble into bed before it was quite dark. So passed the first few days, I purposely proposing neither work nor any employment that the girls might be thoroughly sickened of idleness.
So long as there is a crop, the lapwings keep away, but as soon as the ploughs turn up the ground in autumn they return. The place lies low, and level with the waters in the ponds and streamlets. A mist hangs about it in the evening, and even when there is none, there is a distinct difference in the atmosphere while passing it.
So she made an end and looked at the fairness of the dale spreading wide before her, and a robin came nigh from out of a thorn-bush and sung his song also, the sweet herald of coming winter; and the lapwings wheeled about, black and white, above the meadow by the river, sending forth their wheedling pipe as they hung above the soft turf.
Allowed to visit the Continent at an early age, "these lapwings, that go from under the wing of their dam with the shell on their heads, run wild." They hasten southwards, where in Italy they view the "proud majesty of pompous ceremonies, wherewith the hearts of children and fools are easily taken."
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