Lapwing. 387 



the Peewit, or the remarkable flight of the Lapwing (for both 

 names belong to one and the same bird), as he traverses any 

 portion of the downs ? Kesplendent with a metallic gloss on its 

 dark green upper plumage, capped with a crest or tuft of long 

 narrow curling feathers ; elegant as it runs forward at a rapid 

 pace, and as suddenly stops, and then runs forward again in 

 spasmodic jerks, the Lapwing arrests the attention of the most 

 unobservant. It is indigenous in England, and breeds on our 

 downs ; but assembling in large flocks as autumn approaches, it 

 retires to the sea- coast in November, and returns again at the 

 end of February or beginning of March : and I have long been 

 accustomed to watch for its arrival as the first harbinger of spring 

 in my upland home. Mr. Cordeaux informs us that immense 

 flocks of this species arrive in autumn on the eastern coast from 

 the North, and in Wiltshire Mr. F. Stratton gave me the gratify- 

 ing intelligence on June 29th, 1875, that he had noticed a most 

 extraordinary increase of this bird on his land at Gore Cross, on 

 Salisbury Plain : for whereas he used to see five or six pairs 

 breeding there annually, that year there were hundreds. The 

 previous week he was scarifying a piece of rough land, when the 

 men destroyed forty nests in that place only. The following day 

 he found a Peewit on that same piece of ploughed land sitting 

 on four eggs, whence he concluded that four hen birds must have 

 laid their eggs in that one nest since the previous day. The 

 fact, however, probably was that the bird had been disturbed 

 from its original nest, and had removed its eggs one by one, and 

 was sitting on them. Its eggs are very highly esteemed in the 

 London market, and though doubtless the majority of veritable 

 Plovers' eggs, as the dealers declare, are the produce of the 

 Black-headed Gull, the Peewit's nest is still the object of diligent 

 search : fortunately, however, it is so difficult to find in the 

 extensive corn-fields or wide-spreading expanse of turf, and the 

 parent birds are so cunning in their artifices to entice away the 

 intruder, that it is not very often found in this county at least, 

 where the search for its eggs has happily not become a regular- 

 trade. The bird and its habit of pretending lameness, and the 



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