Hooray, the urban lapwings are back. Well, I say back, but maybe I just don't notice them in summer, and I say urban, but perhaps lapwings always spend winter where it's warmer - why not?
Anyway, there they were, yesterday, tumbling in their haphazard fashion above the town. I remember - years ago now - looking up and seeing crowds of birds overhead that weren't the usual pigeon, seagull or starling, wings oddly, well, odd. I always find 'spoonlike' springs to mind though it's hardly accurate, but due to shape and colour the wings sort of bulge at the end. I didn't twig what they were then, but later I did when I saw dozens of them roosting on the roof of what was then Focus - like an electric blanket for them, I suppose.
They're a breath of the wild. It's not only that they feel in the wrong place just by being there, but that they fly wild - not for them the shoal-like behaviour of starlings and especially pigeons, and even the seagulls get a regular urge to fly in goose-like, swan-like, duck-like 'V's. Instead it's rather like watching a group of exuberant children, together in the loosest sense but all doing their own thing. Any day of the week, at a supermarket near you, some child will be in a little world of their own, acting out a private story while their attached adult gets on with the shopping. They twirl, jump, skip, they peer furtively round corners at invisible foes, they carry out their own many-sided conversations, they haven't a thought for the rest of the world - though they still move on when the shopper moves on. Very like a lapwing.
My own personal flock of (winter?) urban lapwings. They make my day every single time I see them.
Anyway, there they were, yesterday, tumbling in their haphazard fashion above the town. I remember - years ago now - looking up and seeing crowds of birds overhead that weren't the usual pigeon, seagull or starling, wings oddly, well, odd. I always find 'spoonlike' springs to mind though it's hardly accurate, but due to shape and colour the wings sort of bulge at the end. I didn't twig what they were then, but later I did when I saw dozens of them roosting on the roof of what was then Focus - like an electric blanket for them, I suppose.
They're a breath of the wild. It's not only that they feel in the wrong place just by being there, but that they fly wild - not for them the shoal-like behaviour of starlings and especially pigeons, and even the seagulls get a regular urge to fly in goose-like, swan-like, duck-like 'V's. Instead it's rather like watching a group of exuberant children, together in the loosest sense but all doing their own thing. Any day of the week, at a supermarket near you, some child will be in a little world of their own, acting out a private story while their attached adult gets on with the shopping. They twirl, jump, skip, they peer furtively round corners at invisible foes, they carry out their own many-sided conversations, they haven't a thought for the rest of the world - though they still move on when the shopper moves on. Very like a lapwing.
My own personal flock of (winter?) urban lapwings. They make my day every single time I see them.
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