‘Far from her nests the lapwing cries away’
Another breeding bird I used to see on these fields at Lurgashall was the lapwing. In spring the males would thrash around overhead trying to scare me and any other nuisance off their patch, their scallop-shaped wings humming like the wind in overhead cables. Down they would tumble, squealing the wild song of the skies: ‘pee-wit, peewit,’ which gave them their other name. Today the official name is lapwing, but peewit is centuries if not millennia older, and common in Shakespeare’s day though he always used the name lapwing in all his plays. Thus in Comedy of Errors Act 4 Scene 2 he says: ‘Far from her nests the lapwing cries away.’
He was describing how the bird is famous for pretending to be wounded; dragging itself across the ground with a fake broken wing, so alluring a predator away from the eggs or chicks. Ring plovers do this as well.
Then in Much Ado about Nothing, Act 3 scene 1, we have: ‘For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing runs, close by the ground, to hear our conference.’ This describes another habit of the bird which is to scurry away from her nests before flying up with loud cry as though she had only just left the nest.
Shakespeare knew something else peculiar about the lapwing which is that as soon as the chick hatches it may start running off to safety – even with half of the egg shell still stuck on its head. In Hamlet, Act 5 scene 2, Horatio comments to Hamlet: ‘this lapwing runs away with the shell on his head.’ He was using this to describe a somewhat officious courtier called Osric, who was unaware that Hamlet was well aware of the sinister nature of his errand, and who left the room with his pomposity still intact. Imagine any playwright today knowing such detail of the natural world! Imagine an audience knowing what it meant!
Lapwings are exquisite birds with their shoulders and backs of Napier-green, their black bibs, the mimicry of the eye shadow with their small black beaks (see my picture) and their russet under-tail. They were often called green plovers.
They were once so common that vast numbers were caught by netting in winter on our farms, to be sold for food in the city markets. Those were the days when winters were harder than now and flocks fled the Baltic and Scandinavian winters.
I did see a couple of hundred in Chichester harbour at Fishbourne this January and have counted one thousand plus over Thorney Island in recent times but this is nothing compared to the old days. Another name for the peewit in ancient time was ‘wype’, which again was onomatopoeic as it described that wild cry if spelt ‘wee-pee’.
This name is still in use today in Denmark, but long since gone from our language. There is a reference in the old Household Books of Tudor housekeeping that ‘wypes’ could be obtained for important banquets at but a penny a bird. This was roughly the price for a wheatear in the 1890s at Brighton, as also for skylarks then. Will their presence one day become a distant memory as has their place in our culture? That seems very unlikely. The latest distribution figures for the lapwing show that its wintering grounds still cover 78 per cent of the UK.