Black and Red
I am leaning on a gate in Glen Quaich enjoying a brief gleam of early spring sunshine. The world is waking after the dormancy of winter. A snipe is chipping on the marsh behind me, high and invisible a skylark is trilling and a cock red grouse proclaims his territory deep in the heather. Curlews yodel, gaelic speaking oystercatchers repeat bi glic, be wise, calls. The first of the multitude of meadow pipits rises sharply into the air to parachute earthwards trilling its little chatter. But, of all these vernal sounds my favourite comes from the lapwing.
These birds, hated by the covenanters of old, have so many names. Lapwing, or lapwink, is the oldest and comes from the 8th century lepewince. That first syllable was also applied to the hoopoe and refers to the crest, which is so marked in both species. Wince or winch means to move up and down so descriptive of both the crests and the birds’ flight. In Cornwall they are hornywinks and, earlier in the old Celtic language of Cornwall, cornwillen.
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Perhaps the commonest names are onomatopoeic such as pee-wit, teuchit, chewit, tee whip in Orkney and tieve’s nacket in Shetland. Despite their variation none is quite accurate. Peasie-weep, by adding an additional syllable comes nearest to the sound but lacks that essentially Scottish ‘ch’, as in loch. The sound is really peasie-ch-weep; but perhaps that’s too fanciful as a soubriquet.
Watching them displaying in the sun is sheer delight. They are among the most manoeuvrable of birds, dancing and flirting with the wind. They suddenly twist in the air and dive headlong to turn at that moment when crash seems inevitable and then they say it, “peasie-ch-weep”
Though sometimes called a green plover the lapwing always appears to be black and white. If you are fortunate enough to hold the live bird in hand you will see that this is an illusion. The teuchit is every colour imaginable. There are browns and greens, deep glistening purples and blues and even a startling sheen of red and a touch of gold. I have a painting of a Glen Quaich mother Teuchit and chicks by Keith Brockie whose artist’s eye has copied all these colours from his palette. Unless you have the bird in hand you need good light and a telescope to see that this sombre chiaroscuro creature is so wonderfully multicoloured.
What is so odd about this is that, in all the polychromatic world of birds, there are only two natural colours: black and red. These colours are produced by the pigments melanin and carotene. All animals, except albinos produce black melanin. Its absence causes white and in some creatures, the opposite of albinos there is only melanin and they are all black, or melanistic. These variations are commonly seen as white blackbirds or pheasants and sometimes the very dark almost navy blue melanistic pheasants. Melanin occurs naturally in all animals (except albinos) but carotene only in certain animals, especially crustacea. Some trout have pink flesh others white. This is entirely due to their diet; the more shrimps they eat the redder they become. A pink flamingo starved of brine shrimp will revert to white.
To come back to our beautiful peewit the range of colour is produced mostly by balance of the amount of melanin and carotene in the plumage. Mixtures or red and black, like the pigments in the artists palette will produce browns, blues and greens to paint the plumage of each bird.
But there is another colour source. Think of a drop of oil on a pool of water; it causes Newtonian rings where the margin of the two liquids acts as a prism refracting white light into a rainbow. Feathers have the same property, splitting light into spectral colours. Some birds, particularly the sunbirds of Africa and the humming birds of The Americas specialise in this. Pluck a humming bird and you will only have black feathers. The rest is a trick of the light; the sunbird’s brilliance is iridescence. This is present in all birds and can be very deceiving. Once my wife pointed at a pure white bird flying in brilliant sunlight below us over a loch. “What is it?” she asked. A moment later the bird flew into shadow and I was able to see the sable feathers of a carrion crow.
It is astonishing what beauty can come, to those that use their eyes, from two pigments and pure light.
© Robin Hull
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