Lapwings

After Saturday nights Golden Plover, Sunday brought another encounter with a member of the Plover family...The Lapwing.

Pennington Flash was the venue for Sunday mornings birding and the Flash is always a good place to spot these wonderful birds.
I've told you in the past about the sad decline of UK Lapwings especially in their once familiar farmland habitat, but that was only half the story...
Lapwings are equally at home in farmers fields, high moorland, coastal estuary's and large inland bodies of water.
Pennington Flash is the latter and offers a rich variety of habitat which is perfectly suited to these birds.

It's always a lovely sight to see Lapwings gathering over the Flash, more often than not mobbing other birds or bullying them away from prime feeding spots.
The Lapwing is also know as the Peewit in reference to it's distinct call and feeds mainly on worms and insects.
The soft vegetation around the edges of the Flash are perfect hunting grounds for these fine looking birds.

There are good numbers of juvenile Lapwing scattered around Penny at the moment which is very promising.
The young are fairly easy to identify due to their paler colour and much less pronounced crest...

Lapwings are also one of the easiest birds to distinguish in flight, due to their rounded wing pattern which has a very distinctive black and white colouration...

One of the things that makes the Lapwing a firm favourite of mine is quite simply...They are just such beautifully photogenic birds!