Country diary: ‘Your need greater than mine,’ I murmur to the dotterels | Jim Perrin

It’s a bright autumn day as I make my way up by steep paths lined with drystone slate walls through the outskirts of this old quarrying town, making for the high tops of Y Carneddau, the largest land mass over the 3,000ft contour south of the Scottish Cairngorms.

Soon I’m at the fridd wall into the mountain pasture. I wave to some climbing friends at play on the Caseg boulders and set my face to the unremitting grind up the spur of Gyrn Wigau . At its top the gradient eases and I race across to the old path curving in from the north, rounding Drosgl and Bera Bach to head for the summit shelter on Foel Grach .

With my back to its wall and my rucksack for a cushion, I take out my glass and scan across the rough ground ahead of Gwaun y Garnedd. Sure enough, there is movement among the stones and club mosses, scurryings and peepings. This is nesting territory for one of the prettiest and most idiosyncratic of our native waders – the dotterel ( Charadrius morinellus) .

That name suggests foolishness. When I head on towards Carnedd Llywelyn and sit down among these barrenlands, the avian seethe among the stones resolves into a “trip” – the collective noun for a migrant flight of dotterels – the tameness of which is exceptional. They disappear into my rucksack, sit in my lap, peck at my packet of sandwiches.

Their tameness was a danger to them in previous times when they were esteemed a great delicacy. I merely look on with love and amused admiration as my sandwiches are torn apart and rapidly disappear. “Your need greater than mine,” I murmur, as another piece of sardine disappears down a dark gullet.

The hen birds are much more colourful, attractive and bold (in both the English and Irish senses). I pick one up and address her: “Shall you be good today, or shall you be bold?” Her bright eye gleams. I can imagine her responding, “I’ll be bold, mister!”

I put her down, and she’s straight back at the sardines – better fare than spiders, I’m sure. The Irish field-naturalist Desmond Nethersole-Thompson in his Collins monograph on this lovely bird describes years of trooping with his wife and six children up to high places in the Cairngorms to study this gorgeous little bird, the male of which does the rearing and chick-feeding. There’s a pro-feminist for you!

I may have put the hen down, but there she is, unabashed, probing for crumbs around the wreckage of my sandwiches. Why would I begrudge her, when she has the long flight ahead to her winter quarters in the Maghreb?

My youngest son is off to Spain for the climbing this winter. Wouldn’t I make sure that he was well fed before his departure?

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