The Golden Plover has a wonderfully evocative song – only really heard in the UK on moorland areas up in the hills. The sound of it takes me right back to places like the Durham Moors and the Flow Country of northern Scotland. Golden Plovers will be singing in both those places today – I wish I were standing with heather beneath my boots listening to them.
Here’s one from Norway:
…and another from Iceland:
…and one from Lewis, UK:
Amazingly evocative, don’t you agree?
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These birdsong blogs are nostalgia-tastic. In my early teens, and probably pre-teens I would wander over those very moors in nort west Durham bordering on the Allendale moors in Northumberland. Lying in the warm heather listening to the squeak of golden plover and later in the year the hum of bees. Just watching the clouds drift by.
The hay meadows a d rush pasture of the moorland margin fields were stuffed withe snipe, curlew and peewits and as children we loved to see the fluffy bundles of their chicks running around under watchful parent birds.
Thanks for re-kindling those memories.
Only raptors I ever saw were kestrels.
I knew no better then. Even the bird books said buzzards were confined to a western distribution. Ha!
I think all birds have their own charm even Linnets (saw my first of the year this week) The song flight of a Golden Plover is special, in part because Summer plumage Goldies are special. The song when heard never fails to get me to search the sky for the singer, it carries a long way and he can be hard to find. Evocative of days spent on damp moor tops or above the heather line on some special hills in the Dales or Bowland when and where Golden Plover densities were high up to 16 prs per sq km. Stunning plumage, eggs better marked than Lapwing and chicks in a down version of their parents, at a premium to find and ring. Everything about this bird on the breeding grounds is special, yes Curlew song is better, Dunlin are an even greater challenge to find nests or chicks of but the only wader that beats breeding Goldies in the UK is for me Dotterel.
The mournful piping of a Golden Plover, can sometimes be the only sound late in the evening, as you cross the lower ground after a day searching for Dotterel.