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Two chickadees upside down uttering liquid undertones, searched busily for insects next their heads. Wilson's warblers, pine creepers, black-throats, myrtle and magnolia warblers, oven birds, peewits, blue jays, purple finches, passed silently or noisily, each according to his kind.
Some fate, I fear, overtook both starlings and house-martins. Another time it was the season of the lapwings. Towards the end of November , there appeared a large flock of peewits, or green plovers, which flock passed most of the day in a broad, level ploughed field of great extent.
Peewits, with their white breasts glistening, wheeled and screamed about them. The lake was still and blue. High overhead a heron floated. Opposite, the wood heaped on the hill, green and still. "It's a wild road, mother," said Paul. "Just like Canada." "Isn't it beautiful!" said Mrs. Morel, looking round. "See that heron see see her legs?" He directed his mother, what she must see and what not.
So the two young people travelled in a great loneliness of plovers and curlews and peewits, all singing and calling and whistling their hardest. They saw the glimmer of a herd's house or two, faint whitewashed dots on the brown, surface of the moor. But of living souls they met not one.
But a gun went "boomp!" with that thick, damp sort of sound that smacks of black powder, somewhere down on earth, and a huge "herd" of green plover, alias peewits, which are lapwings, rose, as if blown up by an explosion, to meet them, their thousand wings flickering in the frost-haze like a shower of confetti, and the owl was so disconcerted by the disturbance that he dropped back into the night whence he came, as one who falls into a sea.
Many a tramp over the sodden ground did the lads have with Dave, who generally waited for their coming, leaping-pole in hand, and then took them to the peewits' haunts to gather a basketful of their eggs. "I don't know how you do it, Dave," said Dick. "We go and hunt for hours, and only get a few pie-wipes' eggs; you always get a basketful." "It's a man's natur," said Dave.
The sun was shining; a cold, dry wind was blowing; there were sounds of spring in the air, and signs of it on the thorns and larches. Far away on the boundary wall of the farmland a cuckoo was sitting, his long tail swinging behind him, his monotonous note filling the valley; and overhead a couple of peewits chased each other in the pale, windy blue.
Golden summers, when he spent whole days out on the cliff or moor with the Parson, their specimen cases at their backs; ruddy autumns when the peewits cried in the dappled sky and the blackberries were thick on the marsh; grey winters when the rain and mist blotted the world out, and he and the Parson sat by a glowing fire of wreckage, the Parson reading aloud from Jorrocks or Pickwick, or the entrancing tales of Captain Marryat, and later, for more solid matter, Grote's "History of Greece," its democratic inferences counterbalanced by "Sartor Resartus," whose thunderous sentences enthralled Ishmael, if their purport was yet beyond him; wonderful pale springs when the sunshine and the blood in his veins were both like golden wine.
But directly the winter gets colder they gather together in the old familiar places, and five or six, or even more, come out at once to feed in the meadows or on the lawns by the water. Green plovers, or peewits, come in small flocks to the fields recently ploughed; sometimes scarcely a gunshot from the walls of the villas.
To the sportsman they are most annoying, by telling every other bird and animal of his approach: to the traveller in the country, they may possibly, as Molina says, do good, by warning him of the midnight robber. During the breeding season, they attempt, like our peewits, by feigning to be wounded, to draw away from their nests dogs and other enemies.
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