THERE may not be gold in them thar hills but at present there's certainly gold in the fields near my home. Not the gold of ripe corn; that has long since been harvested by mechanical monsters which at the same time sowed next year's chosen crop. This gold is the plumage of that most attractive of all small waders, the golden plover. Admittedly it isn't 24-carat just now, for the birds are in winter plumage, but with their spangled black and gold upper-part, they are still a marvellous sight when they rise in flocks of a thousand or more, often to be joined by equal numbers of seemingly black and white lapwing.

Although the two species of plover may be feeding together they soon sort themselves out in the air with the latters' shape and broad-winged rolling flight contrastingly strongly with the fast, pointed-winged motion of the compact golden plovers.

Then on fallow the goldies are not always easy to spot, and I failed to notice some ahead of me the other day until a female sparrowhawk, shooting low across the field, panicked them aloft. However, they soon returned, and there were flashes of light when the sun caught the white undersides of their raised wings as they landed.

The birds we get in Sussex are probably ones that nest in Scotland or northern England, but they may also be passage migrants. Nowadays they seem to start arriving earlier than ever, beginning even in August, and stay until they return to their breeding grounds in late February or March. They have their favourite fields, where they forage in huge numbers.

There are frequent complaints of bird populations being hit by our interference with the environment. But the golden plover and its chicks need short vegetation in which they can move about freely and easily find their insect food. Left to its own devices the moorland nesting areas' vegetation would soon become far too long and dense, so the goldies depend on grazing by sheep and periodic burning by the moorland owners.

The grey plover - the silver version of the golden plover - has a plaintive, haunting call-note; that of the goldie, given usually in flight, is a shorter, liquid note, and its song is a rippling trill, heard only on the breeding ground.

HARRY CAWKELL

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