So it does – the golden plover, most beautiful of British hill-birds and one of the most threatened, its numbers down by over 80% in 30 years, breeds up here, as evidenced by pale juveniles scurrying across tormentil-starred greensward away to my right.
The grey heron is the collateral damage here: it joins the avocet, little grebe and ringed plover among the birds that would be endangered by a four-runway behemoth appearing off the Isle of Sheppey.
"There were golden plover and curlew and lapwing displaying and it was pretty impressive but if there had been a pile of 400 stoats by the road and however many foxes and weasels and a pile of illegally killed hedgehogs, badgers, peregrines, goshawks and short-eared owls then the lapwing and curlew don't look quite so impressive.
By legally trapping and killing stoats and foxes to ensure plentiful supplies of grouse, he helped conserve endangered birds: woodcock, snipe, golden plover, lapwing, ring ouzel, and "buckets and buckets of curlew".
Stretching out on sheep-cropped turf I listened to a high, fluted, yearning bird-call that drifted up from slopes above Llyn y Fedw and brought to mind a line of Burns, from an extraordinary early lyric that's both tender love song and anti-blood sports tirade: "The Plover lo'es the mountains".
If you want to see a mountain hare (turned white in winter), a spangled golden plover or a peregrine falcon, pull on a pair of boots and come to the Peak.
But even in those where both partners help to raise their young to adulthood, one may still decide to leave the other holding the baby.To investigate what causes who to leave whom, and when, a group of animal behaviourists and mathematicians has been studying a shore-dwelling bird called the Kentish plover.
Towards the end of the plover breeding season, the rate of female divorce declines.
In one plover (the wrybill, Anarhynchus frontalis) the bill curves to the right; in the spoonbilled sandpiper (Eurynorhynchus pygmeus) the tip of the bill is broad and spatulate.
The Egyptian plover (Pluvianus aegyptius) buries its egg in sand by day and incubates at night.
American golden plover, wintering in the Pacific, fly directly from the Aleutian Islands (southwest of Alaska) to Hawaii, the 3,300-kilometre 3,300-kilometre 2,050-mile 2,050-miles and more than 250,000 wing beats.
