Upper plumage dark metallic alternating green and purple; a dark crest of upward curling pointed feathers; under plumage white; black chest; orange under tail coverts; beak black; legs brown; eyes dark brown. Total length, 13 inches.
THIS is the “Lapwing” or “Peewit” of England, and is a rarer bird in Egypt than at home. But if you look sharp out, you ought to see it at least once or twice in a run up the river, in small or larger flocks—I do not ever remember to have seen it singly. Why I have chosen this bird as one of our fifty is, because go where you will, north or south, you see the undoubted counterfeit presentment of this bird engraven on the walls of all the temples.
Many see it, but are misled by the rather mad armlike-looking thing brandished out in front of the bird’s face, and never see the undoubted portrait of a Plover till it is actually pointed out. Why this bird should have been chosen, and why the owl and the vulture should have been selected from the great mass of Egypt’s birds, we cannot explain, but can only draw attention to the fact, and find interest in the thought that just as now this bird may be seen, so in the old far-away dynastic days it must have been a familiar bird, or it would certainly not have been selected for use in picture and hieroglyph. Some few breed in Egypt, it is said; but certainly the bulk all go north and west when spring-time comes. This is the bird that supplies gourmands with their annual dainty of Plovers’ eggs; it lays four in the simplest of nests—a mere slight depression in the ground—and as soon as the young are hatched, within a few hours of actual birth into the outer world, they are running about nimbly on their own little legs, and, at the instigation of their fond parents, catching flies and insects with their own little bills. In this matter of the helplessness, or reverse, of newly-hatched birds, is a most interesting field for research. The proud eagle’s young are, for a long time, as helpless as our own babies, and, it is alleged, have sometimes to be forcibly pushed out of the home; whilst, as we have seen, Plovers’ young are born almost self-supporting. And this precocity, as it seems, is also seen in young ducklings, and in all the so-called game-birds: all they ask for is their mother’s wings to protect them against the weather, and warmly shelter them at night.
SPUR-WINGED PLOVER
Hoplopterus spinosus
Arabic, Zic-zac
Crown, nape, chin, centre of throat, breast, and tail black; white cheeks, white under and above tail, back and sides of wings a grey-brown, a sharp hard spur on point of shoulder, bill, feet and legs black, eyes rich crimson. Entire length, 12 ins.