Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve spent hours watching those lapwing chicks. They’re fascinating, and time has slipped away through my binoculars as they forage and scamper in the kale stubble. The adult birds have been extremely cautious and caring in every detail, and even the slightest disturbance is met by the male’s raucous wrath. He rises up crying when the crows come by, and he’s never done worrying about the buzzards and kites which frequently circle above the hot, dry field. It’s grand to see him boldly battering kites which are so much larger than he is, and I think the victory is very often down to his courage and front-footedness – but I also know that while kites look scary, they’re actually stupid, cowardly birds and they’re easily put off by a firm hand.

Knowing that there was a constant risk of predation, perhaps I expected that it would be extremely dramatic and spectacular. I assumed that crows and magpies would take every opportunity to steal the chicks, and disaster would occur in a sequence of irresistible lightning bolts. In reality, I have often seen crows and magpies flying or resting nearby without showing any interest in the chicks at all. They simply weren’t that bothered, and I never saw any corvid making a serious attempt to steal the chicks. That’s not to say that they weren’t trying when I wasn’t looking – only that it wasn’t the massacre I sometimes reach to imagine.

In the aftermath of the hatch, a single egg was left in the nest. My trail camera shows me that the chicks were kept in and around the nest for seventy two hours after hatching, and that’s longer than normal in my book. Knowing that one of the eggs was being slow, I wondered if the adult bird was waiting for it to hatch before leading off her entire brood. Once she’d finally abandoned the last egg, I went out and gathered it up to see why it hadn’t hatched. Looking closely, I saw it had four extremely subtle little crunches in the shell, all gathered around the pointed end. Plus, it was noticeably smelly, even to me. Something had damaged it, and the embryo had afterwards died. When I pulled the shell open, the insides were rancid – it was clear that development had stopped around day four or five. 

Given that I could smell this horrible rotten egg, it’s obvious that the adult lapwings would also have been able to smell it too. At the same time, the dried-out yolk was smudged into the pointed end so that the whole egg felt unbalanced and wobbly when I moved it. Birds have a very close connection with their eggs and they know exactly how the embryos are developing beneath them. Recognising all these many nasty signs of failure, it seems extremely unlikely that the lapwings were still expecting this egg to hatch. The only surprise is that they didn’t throw it away when it started to smell, and there are lots of examples of adults disposing of rotten eggs before they introduce bacteria and nastiness into the nest. I’m not sure why these birds remained in the nest for 72 hours after hatching – but it probably wasn’t on account of waiting for this egg.

Having said that predators appeared to be showing little interest in these chicks, it was suddenly obvious that three had become two on day seven. I have no explanation for how this loss occurred, but a single chick lost from a brood probably suggests an avian predator. If a fox had found lapwing chicks, it would keep hunting until it killed them all. In fact, there was an excellent photograph shared online last week of a fox which had been shot in the Borders with three lapwing chicks in its mouth. Perhaps a badger might have found one and gobbled it up, but I have it in mind that badgers are worse for nests than they are for chicks. Nothing is certain, and it’s maddening how many wader chicks are lost each year to causes which have to be described as “unknown”.

All the while, insects blossomed and the weather played perfectly in the lapwing’s favour. Soft rain at night was steamed away by warm, consoling sunshine. The field was alive with invertebrates, damp soil and brightness. Instead of having to be warmed and brooded by the adult birds, the chicks could feed themselves and then fall asleep where they stood. At one point, they went without brooding for three hours – and that’s a far better way to go grow up in the world than chicks which are raised in the rain and spend half of every hour being dried out and warmed up by their mothers. If there were a hundred reasons why lapwings failed to breed successfully, I’d accept the game as a busted flush. However, it sometimes seems like it’s only farming and predation to blame – and it’s tantalisingly easy to imagine you can do something about these, particularly when everything else is so obviously in their favour.

On day ten, two chicks became one. Again, there’s no real explanation for why or how this happened – and I try and console myself with the thought that when I found this nest, I would never have imagined that the eggs would have survived long enough to hatch. The adult lapwings have done so well, but there are no points for “nearly” in this business. Nothing counts unless they can cross the finish line, and with only one chick left, the whole spring now hangs on little more than hope.

Picture: The unhatched lapwing’s egg