The Year of Birds, Week somewhere in the high 20s, I think

Parakeet | Plover | Kingfisher | Swift

Ring-necked parakeet

The ring-necked parakeet is a shy bird. It flies below the radar, barely impinging on the lives of those around it. Elusive, taciturn, skulking, it lurks in the bushes, rarely drawing attention to itself. If you’re lucky enough to glimpse one, it will, likely as not, disappear before you’ve had a chan—

No, wait. Hang on. Scrub that. I must be thinking of some other bird.

I find I first wrote about the ring-necked parakeet nearly ten years ago, in Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?

Strong views, exaggerated for comic effect. In truth, I’m rather fond of a parakeet (NB the use of the singular), but am fully aware that they divide opinion, as I discovered when reading the comments on my Country Diary for The Guardian last year.

Opinions, eh?

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Ringed Plover

This ringed plover egg is from the collection of ornithologist Jacques Perrin de Brichambaut and now lives in the Museum de Toulouse

Camouflage is a tricky thing. I’ve never got the hang of it myself. I have a long-sleeved orange T-shirt that would enable me to blend in against the backdrop of the bathroom in our family home ca. 1975, but that’s about it.

On the face of it, camouflage is as close to a miracle as makes no difference. How, you ask yourself, does – for example – the lizard know what it looks like against – let’s say – that tree, when it can’t stand outside itself, check how it blends in, and make any necessary adjustments?

Then you think about it for a bit (or, if you’re Charles Darwin – who did the lion’s share of the heavy lifting in the thinking department on this subject – really quite a lot) and you realise that it’s not really the lizard making the decisions – it delegates the big calls to Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. The lizards that didn’t blend seamlessly into their background? Dangerously visible and therefore picked off by predators long ago, with a resulting refinement of the gene pool.

And so it is with plovers’ eggs.

In this case, it’s the egg of the common ringed plover (Charadrius hiaticula), but you could choose from a variety of its cousins – egg camouflage is a widely practised phenomenon in the plover family, and extremely effective from the evolutionary point of view. The markings on the egg pictured above (isn’t it beautiful, by the way? Aren’t eggs beautiful?) make it all but invisible on the pebbly beaches favoured by the bird. So much so that they don’t bother finding a sheltered or elevated location for the nest, but merely scrape out a little depression on the ground and lay the eggs there.

But times change, new threats emerge, and there are situations where the camouflage of the plover’s egg, for so long its saviour, becomes its downfall. And yes, it is, inevitably, our fault. So many things are, these days.

We might not favour pebbly beaches in quite the same way as plovers do – our inclination is for sand – but that doesn’t mean we eschew them completely. And the rise in seasiding (and, whisper it, beachy dog-walking) during the 20th century brought with it new danger for the plovers. Even if we’re looking for them, the eggs are hard to see. And we’re not, generally, looking for them. So they get trampled. Or, at the very least, the birds and their nests are disturbed, their breeding pattern disrupted.

But flexibility can be key to survival. Ringed plovers have, over the last 100 years or so, shifted their breeding activities to new locations: gravel pits, reservoirs and so on. There they can get on with the serious business of raising their chicks with far less fear of human disturbance.

The chicks themselves are also well camouflaged. This is a useful asset, because – unlike many chicks, especially those of songbirds, which are born featherless, blind and completely helpless (‘altricial’) – they are ‘precocial’. They emerge from the egg ready for action: fluffy, mobile, alert, and almost unbearably cute. I mean, just look at them. (The birds in this video are in fact piping plovers, a close American cousin of the ringed plover, but the behaviours are extremely similar).

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Water of Leith

My most recent Guardian Country Diary concerned the one place I always make sure I visit when I’m in Edinburgh.

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The swifts, the swifts

This, by Kate Bradbury, is quite (“quite” as in “extremely”, not “quite” as in “sort of rather”) beautiful.