68 



SPRING 



incubated long enough in that position to have pressed a deep 

 print in the soil. When a second set of only three eggs is 

 laid, they seem more often to lie just as they come than in 

 the trefoil pattern, which is the nearest approach to the 

 typical arrangement of the full set. Like farmyard chicks, 

 which also leave the eggshell in the full possession of their 

 infant senses, young plovers can often be heard piping within 

 the shell if we lift the eggs to our ears when they are nearly 

 hatching in May. The dull, opaque shell of the hardest egg 

 is smeared with the dried mud carried 

 by the bird's feet in the April storms. 

 It looks like dullest tortoiseshell, and 

 has lost almost all the beauty that it 

 had when freshly laid ; but half-born 

 within it stirs the note of coming life 

 under the May sky. 



Golden plovers are later nesters 

 than the green plover, peewit, or lap- 

 wing, and are often only settling down 

 v t .'.III in their nesting-places in the first half 

 " of May, when the young lapwings are 



quickly hatching even on the high 

 moors. Lapwings are, above all things, 

 quaint and delightful, with their antics on their crooked 

 wings, their perpetual sham attacks above their nesting- 

 places, and their wild spring hallooing. Golden plover are 

 very different and far shyer. They haunt in spring only 

 the higher or lonelier moors ; a single pair can sometimes 

 be found settled alone on some grassy summit overlooking 

 half a dozen counties. Their pointed wings and clean flight 

 are very unlike the broad vans and circling orbits of the 

 peewit ; and their most frequent notes in spring is not the 

 liquid whistle which falls from their autumn flocks, but a 



LAPWING CHICK 



