Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve been surprised by the number of lapwings I’ve found this spring, and it’s been revealing to spend more time around these birds. Unlike curlews, it seems like lapwings are less faithful to a point of origin. In some years, they won’t return at all to formerly useful sites – at other times, they’ll appear as if from nowhere to breed in locations that please them after an absence of many years. They work as a nice counterpoint to the curlew’s monotonous fidelity, and I like the idea of lapwings drifting in the sky like spat in a sea current.

I believe that lapwings are suffering an even more disastrous fate than curlews in Galloway, but this sense of seasonal rootlessness gives me a feeling that their decline is masked by the movement of incomers and outgoers. Masked or flagrant, the reality is that many birds will already have failed by now in the last week of April, and while further attempts might be made later in the spring, the window of success is getting narrow.

One strange exception to this rule is on a farm near Balmaclellan where lapwings seem to breed with surprising success. There are no gamekeepers or predator control on this property, and it’s surrounded on all sides by vast areas of mature conifer plantations. This is badger country par excellence, and it seems like everything is tipped against these birds succeeding. However what they have in their favour is a handful of very small, rather fragmented pieces of top-notch breeding habitat; some in the mossy margins of a loch and another in the blocked up remains of an old millpond. Both are extremely wet places; when I went to set a trail camera at the millpond nest this spring, it was most definitely a job for my wellington boots. The nest was built on a little tussock of moss surrounded by pools of standing water, and when you’re used to seeing lapwings nesting in dry fields, it made for quite an odd spectacle. However, these locations are some of the most consistently successful lapwings nest-sites I know.

It’s partly down to the wetness. I doubt that many ground predators want to wade to their bellies in sludge for the eggs, and the boggy areas are big enough that the scent of a nest probably doesn’t carry to dry land to inspire an attempt in the first place. The greatest threat is probably a sudden fall of rain which would flood these eggs quite quickly, but a succession of dry springs has worked in their favour. When the chicks hatch, they walk into a superbly cryptic habitat full of insects – success is not guaranteed even then, but it’s wildly more likely than many more traditional dry habitats.

It makes sense that habitat quality influences breeding productivity, and if predation pressure increases as habitat quality declines, that’s a clear mechanism to drive failure. So it’s not so hard to assume that lapwings which nest in less-than-perfect places require a proportionate degree of human protection from predators. Conversely, when they find an ideal location to nest, they can manage their own affairs without additional support. That’s an interesting dynamic, but I wouldn’t infer from this that we should abandon the birds which attempt to breed in drier, more vulnerable locations. Predator control and habitat management work together as two parts of the same deal, and the lesson I take from this farm is some kind of meeting in the middle; we can’t all have lovely sludgy millponds, and lapwings cannot survive on a few isolated scraps of leftover mud. It’s on us to make less-good-places better and sustain a clearer balance which accommodates all the challenges of a busy, and ever-more demanding countryside.