Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having monitored a pair of nesting golden plover for just over three weeks, it’s well worth reporting that their chicks hatched on Thursday. For the next seventy two hours, the young birds staggered and strutted around the nest like tiny tyrants, and they finally moved offscreen to embrace the future just as the camera filled with condensation and died. It was like a curtain falling on a fine performance.

I’m seriously impressed by these birds, but golden plover are famously vulnerable to predation as chicks. A happy hatch is no sure sign of success, and while I hate to cast a pessimistic moan over the sunlit uplands, real progress can only be measured by the number of birds which make it to fledge. It will be several weeks before these little chicks can fly, and while the weather has set fair for them, ravens and foxes wait around every corner.

Snow fell with sleet during the course of their incubation, and there were times when the parent birds were wholly buried in drifts more than ten inches deep. But the hill was restored by a few warm days, and when I changed the camera batteries on Wednesday last week, the sky was full of small craneflies blowing like thistledown across the wind-clipped plateau. The conditions were close to being balmy, and the parent birds’ faith was repaid.

Monitoring this nest has been a wildly rewarding project. It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve learnt more about ground-nesting birds in the last month than I would usually learn in a year. Good luck to the youngsters, and here’s hoping they’ll return to nests of their own in the future.