"A big flock of them - must have been about 400," he said with some excitement, for there had been some comment that this year the lapwing had not been seen in its usual haunts between Navan and Kells. But there they were, at Martry. Lovely birds with their little crest of feathers, their plumage mostly black and white, but the black having a green sheen. Commonly known as peewit because of their call. Their rounded wings make a throbbing or lapping sound which, according to one book, is the origin of their name lapwing. They nest on the ground and often so close together. A young man, intrigued by the sight of a couple of the birds moving around, entered a field and found he had to keep his eyes ever watchful in case he should step into a pool of eggs. The nests are often little more than a scrape in the earth. Plovers' eggs used to be a delicacy until all that was prohibited by legislation.
A pair of Irish journalists, having been invited to his club for lunch by a prominent British politician, were intrigued (this in days when the eggs were still legally on menus) to hear his choice for openers as being plovers' eggs. They thought they'd have the same. The eggs duly arrived, and, no doubt, were presented as Mrs Beeton would have it: "served boiled hard and sent to table in a napkin, either hot or cold". They watched their host to see what the procedure was. He went on talking and then smartly rapped an egg on his plate and nimbly tore off the broken shell and popped the contents into his mouth. They had learned something. Of course, it is not unknown to eat small birds' eggs fried on toast. The point, however, is that the game birds are now farmed quails. David Cabot, in his Collins Guide to Irish Birds, tells us that there are up to 22,000 pairs of lapwing during the breeding season. Their wonderful, wild, tumbling flight, especially during the mating season has been written about by many well-known naturalists: in England, W. H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies for example.
Hudson wrote: "The sense of beauty is God's best gift to the human soul" and he describes with awe the antics of a male bird dashing himself, apparently suicidally, to the ground from a great height, only to swerve up when maybe an inch from disaster. Hudson watched while the bird did it more than 50 times. March is the breeding season. Watch out for the aerobatics if you are near a field where they nest: rough or marshy ground, sometimes cultivated land. Y