There’s a shimmering in the sky and I can’t work it out. Driving, I can only snatch glimpses of flickering light. I pull into a lay-by near home. Now I can make out five or six broad-winged birds, flying in a loose flock. They are black and white and their motion reflects the low sun, flashing light and contrasting dark, like a disturbance in the force field.
Lapwings, or “peewits” as they are known for their call, are birds of my childhood. Every spring, they nested in the same field and, in winter, flocks gathered. I loved their crest and the way their petrol-sheened plumage changed with the light, from dark green to bronze or purple.
We saw them most intimately at night, on our pyjama-clad safaris, as they fed on invertebrates by moonlight when there was less risk of predation. I longed to witness the subterfuge for which they are known, feigning a broken wing, flapping and stumbling to draw a predator away from vulnerable eggs or chicks. No wonder Chaucer described them as “ful of trecherye”.
Going further back, to 60 or so years ago, my dad recalls huge flocks of lapwings that would follow the plough as gulls now do. As a child, he’d sit on the back of the tractor – no cab in those days – and take shots at them with an air rifle. Despite the Protection of Lapwings Act of 1928, they were still commonly eaten. The eggs were prized as a delicacy, although usually no more than two were taken from a clutch of four.
Habitat loss has had the greatest impact on the lapwing’s decline, but Dad and I look back with disbelief at how their abundance was taken for granted. Aside from an occasional nomadic group, we have not had lapwing on the farm for over a decade.
Now the sky and ground are owned by corvids. Rooks swirl above the woodland and jackdaws hop over the pastures in pairs, spreading horse droppings to find beetles and grubs. If temperatures drop on the continent, lapwings are encouraged to cross the North Sea, often arriving just ahead of a cold snap, harbingers of bad weather. I still miss our breeding population, but to see them back here at all lifts the heart.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
