"Try the plovers' eggs," said the MP to the Irish journalist in a London club. So he did, not knowing in what shape or form they would appear before him. They came whole, in their shells and, if the establishment was doing things the Mrs Beeton way, they would have been served boiled hard and delivered to the table in a napkin. Either hot or cold.
The journalist looked at his plate and wondered. He was soon shown how, when the politician picked up one, rapped it briskly off his plate, peeled off the shards of eggshell and proceeded to eat. This must have been before certain wildbird acts, though there is a memory that the law was not broken when plovers' eggs were imported from abroad, from countries where the birds were not protected. How many of us have eaten them? They may be used, according to Mrs B to decorate salads, "the beautiful colour of the white being generally so much admired."
All this comes to mind after watching large flocks of lapwing or peewit circling over the countryside, their rounded wings and the white underside making them unmistakable even from a distance. Have there been fewer in recent years? Is modern farming leaving them with less of suitable breeding ground?
David Cabot tells us In his pocket size and most useful book Irish Birds that they choose rough pasture, grass land and sometimes arable fields for laying. He says they start nesting in March, with "replacements in May and June". The lapwing or green plover is one of those birds which is expert at diversionary tactics when surprised on the nest. The old fowler, Sir Ralph Payne Gallwey, notes that they seldom if ever rise straight off their eggs, but will rather run, crouching slyly through the grass or heather for some distance, and then flap up and fly towards, the intruder, thus deluding him with the idea that they have at the moment left their charge; instead of which the eggs may have been passed and almost trodden under foot. He then tells you a tried and successful method of finding the eggs.
Their tumbling flight makes lovely sight and their plaintive "pee wit" call a spring sound to cherish in the memory.