The Northern Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), usually just known as the Lapwing here in the UK, where it is the only kind of lapwing regularly occurring, is a wading bird in the Plover family (I talked about this family in the blog on Ringed Plover a few days ago - Day 17 - Ringed Plover).
This species has been known by a lot of different names in different parts of the British Isles over the years, including Peewit, Pyewipe, Tuit (all being renderings of the thin, high-pitched call) and Green Plover. This last, is what my Irish father called it when I was young, along with several other 'folk' names for birds - Crane for Grey Heron, Skaul Crow for Hooded Crow and Black Hag for both Great Cormorant and European Shag. When I started to become a fully fledged birder as a teenager, he stopped using these names, in favour of what I thought (and I'm sure told him) were the 'proper names'. Now, several decades later, I regret this and can see that these 'folk' names for birds actually make the language richer, as well as being a reminder of a time when ordinary 'folk' actually knew what these birds were, even if they didn't know the 'official' names for them.
The Green Plover (or Peewit, or Pyewipe, or Northern Lapwing) was once an extremely common bird which would be seen all over the country, both as a breeder in the summer and in huge flocks on arable fields in the winter along with its cousin the Golden Plover. Numbers have plummeted in recent decades and Lapwing is now on the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern (BOCC4) because of the extent of the decline. It can still be seen fairly easily at the coast or at wetland nature reserves (such as the RSPB's Saltholme reserve, where these photos were taken), but the overall numbers are much lower than they would have been forty or fifty years ago.
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