The lapwing or peewit or even peewee is surely one of the most graceful of birds: greenish-black on top, white underneath and with that most distinctive plume streaming from the back of its head. Not long ago The Daily Telegraph of London gave a whole page to the fact that it is in steep decline in Britain, and that its plight has been largely overlooked. How is it doing in Ireland? It may be that the flocks have just changed their nesting place, but in County Meath, peewits that used to be admired near Dunshaughlin in passing have not been noticed for a couple of years.
The writer in the Telegraph, Robin Page, gives many reasons for the bird's decline - mostly due to changed farming practices. Lapwings like to nest in almost open ground or in short crops. The switch by farmers to a rotation based on winter-sown wheat, barley and rape results in vegetation too high for the lapwing. Silage growth means that cutting is done in the nesting season. Pasture is widely being improved by drainage and the cutting of rushes. There are other examples, and then there are the pesticides, killing useful insects and even harming the birds directly.
The great naturalist W. H. Hudson wrote enthusiastically of the peewit as a daredevil flyer: "Flying is to him like riding, cycling, rowing or sailing, and skating (I wish I could add ballooning or rushing about in a flying machine) to ourselves. It is his sport; and during the spring and summer, when peewits live in small parties or pairs, he spends a great part of his time in those quite useless, but doubtless exhilarating displays which we are never tired of watching. Rising to a considerable height in the air, he lets himself go, with the determination apparently of breaking the peewit record; that is to say, of rushing downwards in the approved suicidally insane manner, with sudden doublings this way and that, and other violent eccentric motions designed to make him lose his head and finally to come at fullest speed within an inch, or as much less than an inch as he can, of dashing himself into a pulp on the ground below."
Hudson knew his bird life. And where is the plaintive call. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of it from his faraway sunny home in the South Seas: Be it granted me to behold you again in dying/Hills of home! and to hear again the call;/Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,/And hear no more at all.