Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having saved the lapwing eggs from an ignominious end beneath slurry tankers, Nitrogen spreaders and field rollers, I began to embrace a foolish flicker of hope. The nest camera worked perfectly, and I recorded many hours of intimate and pristine footage which revealed the little bird attentive at her eggs and defying the odds for 21 days into a 26 day incubation period. Against all odds, success seemed to lie just around the corner. Then, with a bizarre twist of unexpected fate, my joyful suspense dissolved into ruin.

I began this project under the fairly pessimistic belief that badgers had spelled the end for groundnesting birds in Galloway. However, I soon learned how significant agricultural damage can be for lapwings, and that really put the significance of badgers into perspective. I have no doubt that badgers are a leading cause of trouble – but they’re only one cause amongst many. Nature is far too complex to suffer a single explanation for anything.

Returning to change the batteries in my nest camera on Monday, I noticed that the eggs had been destroyed; munched up into little shreds and spat back into the nest (photo above). That was a nasty jolt, but I was consoled by the realisation that I had captured the destruction on film. So perhaps you can imagine the fury I expressed (very noisily) when I realised that the camera had malfunctioned, failing to record the events leading up to the eggs’ destruction. I could’ve screamed until my vocal cords were torn and bleeding.

Calmer and more rational now, I’m able to process the realisation that this nest was raided by a hedgehog. I shared a photograph of the egg remains with a number of key specialists who confirmed the diagnosis, and on close examination of the mashed-up egg membranes, I can even see the marks left by peggy little teeth. A hedgehog… a hedgehog in a parish where hedgehogs are almost nonexistent nowadays… because, in large part, they’ve been hunted out by badgers. This kind of irony is heavy enough that handling it requires me to be cautious of back injury.

In July 2018, a hedgehog was killed on the main road near this lapwing’s nest. Hedgehogs have become so scarce in this part of the world that I stop the car to examine dead ones out of sheer curiosity. I even wrote about that dead animal in my diary because it was so unusual. I have only seen one other hedgehog in Galloway during the intervening three years. In a landscape where hedgehogs have been reduced to the slimmest paucity, the chances of one finding this lapwing’s nest are so madly remote that I never, even for a second, believed it possible. I had been so avidly focussed on badgers that I missed the greatest curveball of the year so far – that one incredibly scarce animal should contribute to the destruction of another.

During a chance phonecall with a gamekeeper friend in Norfolk this morning, I was interested to hear that hedgehogs frequently raid the lapwing and redshank nests on the marsh near his home. Hedgehogs are an extreme rarity in his part of the world, and his story seemed to confirm my growing realisation that even a tiny handful of hedgehogs can exert a disproportionately large impact on groundnesting birds. I’d love to see more hedgehogs in Galloway, just as I’m desperate to preserve and improve the landscape for lapwings – I have no desire to cast this as a conundrum based on “good nature” vs “bad nature” – it’d be silly to place too much emphasis on this single incident, but it’s worth noting that while I’ve been grumbling about badgers for years, I failed to realise how complex the situation really is.

Suffice to say that the adult lapwings have now abandoned these fields and they won’t try to breed again here until next year, when fewer will return and their toehold will be weaker than ever before. Time is running out for them, and for all I derive some comfort in the curiosity of this outcome, there’s no avoiding the fact that it’s a disaster.