“Can you see it?” I say. “Up there. A skylark.”
“Yes,” says my daughter, not seeing it.
It’s bright and blustery up on the moor edge, on the south bank of the great slug of upland that divides the dales of the Aire and the Wharfe. Cruising raptors seem almost to pitch themselves off the edge of Eldwick Crag into the deeper air of the valley: a kite, a buzzard, a kestrel pair. As we climb the path, the skylarks pop up, song-powered, spring-propelled, from the farmland on our right. Where they cross a cloud they’re easy to see; then you lose them in the blue.
They’ll be nesting soon (the skylark, Shelley’s “scorner of the ground”, in fact, lays its eggs there, in loose, low vegetation). They will share their breeding quarters here with lapwings, which are making a start right about now. We watch a few of them putting on an airshow of twisting display flight – black-bolero wings working madly, shrieks of glee a stone’s throw from hysteria.
Lapwings always seem to be having fun. An old legend, though, tells otherwise: it says that each lapwing embodies the damned soul of someone who jeered Jesus at his crucifixion, transformed and banished to the wild places (“filling the air with their eternal wail”, wrote WR Calvert in his 1937 novel Wild Life on Moor and Fell).
I’m not buying it. Weeoop, say the lapwings. Peeeooo!
I pick up my daughter.
“Can you see them?”
“Yes.”
She’s holding her binoculars backwards.
The lapwings, if not cursed, may yet be ill-fated. They are red-listed now – the highest level of conservation concern. UK populations have crashed with the rise of spring cropping and intensified pasture management.
Lapwings have been here before, in the 19th century, when farmland restructuring and a rise in “egging” for food led to a population crash; that time, eventually, they came back.
A little later, by the canal, we hear our first chiffchaff of the year. The trees are still leafless; he’s not hard to pick out.
“Can you see him? In the treetop there?”
“Yes.”
I’ll take her word for it.
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