Lapwings

I saw a couple of lapwings at Churchtown this afternoon, in the field where horses graze between the green lane and the cemetery. This is the first time I have ever seen lapwings in Cornwall, and was a great surprise. I wonder whether they are merely passing through, or looking for somewhere to settle.

When I lived on Harris the lapwings were a constant presence day and night - if you couldn't hear them you could see them - and in the nesting season were quite aggressive if you walked near a nest. The only place I have seen them in quantity since them was up at Strensham in the fields there. I thought they only liked flat grassland or arable fields, and that Cornwall would have been too hilly, but the girl I was talking to at Churchtown who also saw them said that she had been brought up in the Scillies and there were a lot of lapwings there.

While we were comparing notes on lapwings, Ty was haring round the fields with her two Borzois. One of them is quite young, although many times Ty's size, and it was comical to watch him being all submissive and puppyish. Ty, unusually for him, was quite happy to play too.

Churchtown Summer Afternoon.

Today the weather has been fine - for the first and apparently the last time for a good while. When I took the dog to Churchtown in the afternoon it felt quite strange to be wearing sandals and a shirt. Last time I was there, a couple of weeks ago, the meadows had just been mowed and looked very yellow; after the recent rain they are now quite green again. There was a small flock of longtailed tits, about a dozen, in the brambles - the first I have seen there.

One of the 'arable' fields, which are planted with various plants to provide winter food for the birds (teasels, barley, millet, etc) is full of thistles this year, and the thistledown was drifting across the various paths and meadows like snow - in one or two places it was actually forming drifts on the ground. Many, many butterflies, buzzards calling overhead, swallows flying high... a 'proper' August afternoon, in other words. But for tomorrow they are predicting heavy rain again over the whole country.

Mowing at Churchtown

A better sort of day, today; sunny and breezy and bright. The visibility is so good that from the top of the hill, on the way to Churchtown, I could see right across Dartmoor in one direction and across Bodmin Moor in the other! They were mowing the meadows at Churchtown, and there were lots of swallows wheeling about above the tractor catching the disturbed insects. In one of the other fields I tried to work out from the height of the swallows what the weather was going to be like, but they were flying very high and swooping down almost to the grass, so it is obviously going to be a bit mixed. I got my first horsefly bite of the season - on my left elbow, where I couldn't even swat it away. Actually I did attempt to swat it - an automatic reaction - but quickly remembered why I couldn't.

The Lost Geese

I suppose it was inevitable for a bank holiday monday in May - a wild northeasterly gale and heavy rain. The rain eased off in mid afternoon so I took the dog up to Churchtown for a brisk stroll in the brisk weather. The louring grey skies made it seem quite autumnal, and all of a sudden it sounded autumnal as well as two canada geese flew over, struggling to make headway against the wind but progressing fitfully in a northerly direction.

What were they doing over south east Cornwall at the end of May? One of them very clearly had a wide featherless gap in one wing, so perhaps they had been delayed by injury and are only just now able to obey the northward breeding imperative.