The ‘fool' on the hill

The dotterel adopts an unusual approach to rearing young but its trusting nature has been its undoing and it is now on the ‘red list’

- LINDSAY WADDELL

Unlike many ‘twitchers’, I don’t collect birds in the sense of going many miles just to see one, even hundreds in some cases. There are some I would like to see, however, and one of those is the dotterel. In that respect, I am slightly envious of my brother as, when he was doing some work for the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), he found one on a nest in the Highlands. One day, maybe.

A member of the plover family, the bird is extremely confiding to the point that it will let you approach it to within a few feet at times. This confidence has been the undoing of many birds in the past as they were considered a delicacy and quite heavily hunted, which reduced their numbers considerably before protection stabilised things.

Indeed, the bird’s name is construed as meaning a fool and, dating from around 1440, a dotard was considered an insult relating to a person’s mental ability. It is not known which came first, however, the word as an insult or the name of the bird. Either way, ‘dottery’ is still used in some parts of the country as a term for someone who is unstable. Indeed, in another nod to the bird’s sanity, the Scottish Gaelic name means ‘fool of the moors’.

Role reversal