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THE LAPWING OR PEEWIT. 
intimate with man, of all our swallows ; living together in large com- 
munities of sometimes three or four hundred. On the high sandy 
bank of a river, quarry, or gravel-pit, at a foot or two from the sur- 
face, they commonly scratch out holes for their nests, running them in 
a horizontal direction to the depth of two and sometimes three feet. 
Several of these holes are often within a few inches of each other, and 
extend in various strata along the front of the precipice, sometimes 
for eighty or one hundred yards. At the extremity of this hole, a 
little fine dry grass, with a few large downy feathers, form the bed on 
which their eggs, generally five in number, and pure white, are de- 
posited. The young are hatched late in May ; and the common crow, 
in parties of four or five, as well as the magpie and the kestrel, wait 
and watch at the entrance to the burrows to pounce upon the hapless 
fledgelings in their first attempts at flight. 
THE LAPWING. 
Says Thomas Aird, a Scottish poet too little known in proportion to 
his merits : — 
" Trooping down the barren shore, 
The lapwings wheel their veering flight 
The sandy ferry o'er and o'er. 
Now they're black and now they're white 
Hoarser brawl the wind-curled rills ; 
From out yon gap in the far hiUs 
The hail-blast drifting white and slow 
Seems to come on, but thin and rare, 
Disperses as it hangs in air." 
The lapwing, to us English people, is perhaps best known as the peewit 
or peesweep, whose shrill melancholy cry so often rings over lonely 
moors, or the open sands of the broad river-mouths, or the barren 
hill-side swooping seawards. He is an elegant bird, with plumage 
of shining black and green on the upper part of the head and body, 
and white beneath, which he shows alternately — now black, now white 
— as he flies round and round in the air, with a swift abrupt motion, 
easily distinguishable from that of any other bird. His " manners" 
and "habits" are well worth the study of the amateur naturalist. It 
has been amusingly but not inaccurately said, that during the breeding- 
