AS IT PICKED ITS WAY THROUGH THE daisies in a field in Northumberland, freezing at every second or third step, the elegant little wading bird could not possibly have realised that the nearby group of human onlookers had eyes for nothing else. But thenit’s not every day a bird new to Britain makes landfall here and hangs around to entertain a crowd.The rather dapper grey-headed lapwing hails from the Far East with a breeding population in China and Japan, wintering mainly from India east to Cambodia. The species has been recorded as an extralimital vagrant, from Europe through parts of Asia and the Middle East to Australia. There are recent records of one in Turkey in 2018 and another tracked through several European countries in 2019, paving the way for its very first occurrence here.
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