PLOVERS' EGGS 93 



Among the stones one may find oneself looking 

 at the large cream-coloured eggs, irregularly 

 spotted and blotched with brown and black, with- 

 out seeing them. They are in colour the exact 

 reproduction of the stones they lie among, and 

 their shape and shadowing are not noticeably 

 different. Shape and shadowing make the lap- 

 wing's eggs stand out. It is probable, none the 

 less, that the colouring of the plover's egg does 

 protect it, though not from its chief modern enemy, 

 man. It is as nearly certain as anything of which 

 we have little direct proof can be, that the lapwing 

 and all its family are much v older inhabitants of 

 the earth than man, and that both its defensive 

 instincts and its egg -colouration were evolved for 

 the evasion of foes of quite a different kind- 

 crows, ravens, and, once upon a time, possibly 

 wolves. 



The artfulness of the lapwing in decoying 

 intruders away from its eggs and young is almost 

 proverbial. Chaucer refers to the bird as " the 

 false lapwing full of trecherie " (trickery), and 

 Shakespeare has his allusions to its pranks. In 

 almost every natural history book it is taken as 

 the stock example of the birds which feign a 

 broken wing to draw enemies away. But it cer- 

 tainly does not perform this trick with anything 

 like the perfection of deception of the snipe and 

 more than one kind of wild duck. Mr. Edmund 

 Selous, who has made bird-watching an art, is 

 inclined to deny that it ever does it at all. Come 

 upon a wild duck with young or a nesting snipe 

 and the bird contracts broken wing with almost 



