Spring puts on air show
At last the smiling face of spring is emerging from winter’s final east-wind fling.
Rising temperatures convey a new message and now the dancing can begin as birds seize the mood and begin their courtship rituals. When you see those displays it is easy to understand why man has always envied the birds for their powers of flight.
Every year on England’s south coast intrepid souls, equipped with various designs of wings, still try to fly by leaping off a pier and very quickly plunging into the sea.
However, most of them seem to enjoy marginally more success than Father John Damian, who in the year 1507 and watched by King James IV and his court leapt from the walls of Stirling Castle only to crash-land on the rocks below.
I expect migrant birds to flood in during these spring days. Already short-distance migrants such as lapwings are arriving, unfortunately not in the numbers that we used to see for their populations, like those of the curlew, have dropped dramatically in recent years.
As yet this spring I have only heard a single whaup and only seen meagre flocks of lapwing. During the late 19th and the early 20th centuries lapwing eggs were considered to be a rare delicacy and were therefore eagerly sought, resulting in a decline in these lovely birds.
Some of the older farming folk will tell you that in the more recent past the first clutches of lapwing eggs would be harvested in the knowledge that the birds would lay another clutch. However, in those early days greed overtook reason and until legislation was passed in 1926 to curb such excesses lapwing populations continued to fall.
By the 1960s lapwing populations appeared to have stabilised but in recent decades there have been further alarming reductions, which seem to emanate from changes in the way we farm the land. Increases in the amount of land now turned over to arable crops are thought to be one of the negative factors effecting lapwings, especially with the switch to autumn rather than spring-sown crops which denies them good nesting sites.
And the heavy use of chemicals, herbicides and pesticides seems increasingly to be a major contributory factor. Lapwings feed primarily on invertebrates, which also seem to be in serious decline. When they abandon their coastal and estuarine winter homes and head inland in the spring they extensively upon two of farming’s greatest pests: wireworms and leatherjackets.
The spectacle of these dainty birds marking time as a means of encouraging worms to the surface by simulating falling rain is an example of their ingenuity.
The arrival of lapwings to familiar inland beats initially takes the form of tightl- knit flocks, some of which used to be large enough to blacken the sky. These days those flocks are considerably smaller but as they settle in their new inland realms and the weather warms courtship begins – and what a spectacle that provides.
Now those bat-shaped wings, which seem so well controlled as they fly in their orderly flocks, are fully exercised as the male birds swoop and swerve, duck and dive like dancing
dervishes. They absolutely tumble about the sky in ecstatic displays, their wings audibly throbbing, their voices crying “pee-wit” wildly. They sometimes give the impression of being utterly out of control yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Such wonderful demonstrations of flying skills are not as common as they used to be and there may be many factors at play.
It is true that the tempo of farming practices has been ramped up considerably in recent times. Old Watty used to tell of the times in spring when, if he was ploughing and found in his path a lapwing nest, he would scoop up the eggs and move them and then move them back when he ploughed the next furrows. He, I might suggest, was more in touch with the soil he farmed and the wildlife he was always at pains to protect than many of today’s more modern-minded farming folk.
And, as I’ve said on previous occasions, by encouraging the use of herbicides and pesticides with abandon government is indirectly putting at risk our very future.
We are, according to all the evidence, killing off the vital pollinators of our crops, the insects upon which also so many farmland birds rely.
Lapwings, curlews and skylarks are always in my mind as April progresses for they were the birds I most remember from youthful days when I ventured out to the moors on early hiking expeditions. Few birds enjoy such a list of pseudonyms as the lapwing. Pee-wit, tee-wit, tee-whup, peesie-wheep, teuchit, chewit, flop-wing and tieves nacket are among the many names in use in various parts of the country.
Even when they disperse to breed you will still find a corporate spirit alive in the lapwing population. When youngsters hatch they are kept under quite close scrutiny in a kind of creche manned, when parent birds are away seeking food for their young, by other members of what is in reality a loose colony.
And isn’t that lilting pee-wit, together with the romantic whistling of the whaup, so much the real sound of spring?