Bard’s bird is a wordy wonder
Crossword setters love the lapwing. No bird provides such a lexical bonanza as this grassland plover with its fancy crest, iridescent plumage and distinctive call.
Besides boasting more regional synonyms than most other British birds, the lapwing – also known as the green plover, flopwing, piewipe and lipwingle, to name but a few of its aliases – has also fascinated the greatest wordsmiths in history.
Shakespeare celebrated lapwing ingenuity in defending its nests in The Comedy of Errors, as well as the cleverness of its chicks in Hamlet.
Chaucer was less impressed in his Parliament of Fowls, condemning the bird for deceiving predators with its antics.
One of my favourite contemporary cryptic clues about the lapwing relates to the war on drugs. Charges brought against dealers are known as ‘peewits’, another old name for the bird.
In crime-fighting circles, a peewit is the acronym for ‘possession with intent to supply’.
For all the cultural homage paid to this stately plover, much embedded in the history of pastoral England, mankind has exploited them for food – lapwing eggs were a Victorian delicacy – and we have also ruined much of its habitat through agricultural intensification.
That said, the “peewit” call of the lapwing has been the soundtrack to my spring. I’ve been lucky to hear and see them dotted around fields, gravel pits, sewage works and nature reserves.
Particularly uplifting has been the numbers of chicks in their delightful black and white, fluffy plumages tiptoeing through grassy cover. I hope they survive despite many threats.
Tom Stewart, from the British Trust for Ornithology says, “It’s always a joy to see any lapwing chicks, not least because we’ve lost half our breeding lapwings since the mid-1960s, with a decline of more than a third in just the past 15 years.
“Grassland drainage, the disappearance of mixed farmland and a shift to sowing in autumn rather than spring have all played their part, and threaten other breeding waders too.”
The lapwing gets a mention in The Comedy Of Errors and Hamlet