Unearthly sounds have filled the fields lately, breaking frosty silences or cocking a whooping snook at louring skies. The lapwing’s voice is the joker in the pack, shooting up and down the scales like a novice twiddling the knobs on a synthesiser. It does not feel grounded in this landscape of puddles, mud slaked over boots, ragged grass margins, finches giving out throwaway chirrups, and the dull ribbed skeleton leftovers of last year’s flowers.
Our field-working forebears must have listened daily and tried to capture the distinctive peculiarity of these sounds in words. So much so that Vanellus vanellus may well have more regional names than any other bird. Lancashire’s chewit calls to Orkney’s teeack, Norfolk’s pie-wipe answers Lothian’s peasiewheep. I’m a child of the TV generation, and I always think when I hear the birds that the Clangers have landed.
The other day the calls seemed to colour the great hedgeless fields with emotion. Eee-ooo-eeep. In these shouty expressions, I detected cries of alarm, annoyance, indignation, and sheer mischief.
Where were the singers? The nearest lapwing presented a dark green back in a dark green field, and, without binoculars, I failed to spot it at first. This bird was on sentry duty, teetering on its toes, neck straightened and stretched, wings folded back, its stance meerkat-alert. Its head was level and still. It was looking at me. Perhaps.
Out to the right of the standing bird, and some way back across the field, two, no three, lapwings were raising and lowering their wings as if they were trying on capes for size, their feet paddling and stomping with the exertion, or as if making a pouty point. Each lift raised brilliant white inner wings.
Yet more lapwings appeared, a flock of six rolling across the sky, inner and outer wing feathers flashing black-white-black-white. A generation ago, two generally accepted names vied for supremacy among ornithologists. Peewit eventually lost out to lapwing and sound was eclipsed by vision. This incoming flock seemed to epitomise that dominance. Lapwings, flapwings, they flew over their noisy companions, squabbling and posturing on the ground below.
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