Wednesday 2 April 2014

Green Plover on Skeg Fen

There was a single Lapwing, or Green Plover as they were once called in East Anglia, displaying this morning on the equally romantically named Skeg Fen. Their display is an annual treat for me.  Forget the balletic elegance of the Crested Grebe, the soaring, tumbling aerobatics of the Buzzard or even the Raven's propensity for flying upside down; for sheer madcap buffoonery you can't beat the Lapwing.  It reminds me a bit of a kid playing cops and robbers pretending to have been shot and doing an extended, staggering, drawn out death scene, reeling and bobbing around before eventually hitting the ground only to leap straight back up again. The really lovely thing was that as far as I could see there wasn't even another lapwing nearby watching.