Northern Lapwing greeting card, blank inside 7x5” 300gsm textured card with brown Kraft envelope.

No cellophane wrap provided to reduce packaging waste.

The northern Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) is a member of the plover family of birds, and has many alternate names such as Green Plover, peewit/pewit, tuit/tew-it and pyewipe. The latter three names here are onomatopoeic of the lapwing’s call, whereas its ‘Lapwing’ name is thought to refer to the bird’s slightly uneven flight, as one variation of the word in Old English means ‘to totter’, another means 'leap with a flicker in it' supposedly referring to how a flock of lapwings appear to flicker between black and white as they wheel and flap their wings, and vanellus is from medieval Latin vannus, ‘a winnowing fan’. These birds often look black and white from a distance, but upon close examination their backs are a beautiful range of green feathers with a sparkling purple and turquoise sheen.

Lapwings have a special place in my heart due to a clinker-built wooden sailing dinghy that is almost exclusive world-wide to Aldeburgh, Suffolk – where I was lucky enough to spend all my holidays as a child (and still now too), and also learn to sail. There is a fleet of these beautiful little boats in Aldeburgh, including the first lapwing boat ever built, which of course has the sail number 1 and is named Lapwing. The tradition is that each lapwing boat must be named after a bird species, here are some of the Aldeburgh lapwing names; Sea Swift, Skua, Whaup, Shoveler, Kittiwake, Phoenix, Gannet, Redwing, Puffin, Turnstone, Knot, Hummingbird, Pipit…

My family’s first lapwing was Sea Swift (number 10), now owned and sailed by my aunt and cousins, and our boat now is Wol (number 65) named after the owl in Winnie-the-Pooh. They are wonderful boats to sail, albeit extremely uncomfortable and leaky – but great fun nonetheless, (I promise)!

Unfortunately, the bird variety of Lapwing is close to becoming as rare and endangered as the boat, being place on the Red List for conservation concern in 2009, with species decline being attributed partially to intensive agricultural techniques and their favoured rough grassland being converted to arable land. Lapwing nests are simply basic scrapes in the mud, so are easily threatened by changing land use and diminishing territories – however they very aggressively defend their eggs from all potential attackers, including horses and cattle.