Lapwings, along with skylarks, are iconic farmland birds, easily recognised by anyone. The lapwings’ calls, as they swoop over the fields displaying, is one of the first signs that spring has arrived and winter has broken.
Once a common breeding bird across most of Britain, numbers have declined drastically by over 50 per cent between 1970 and 2010, according to Common Bird Census/Breeding Bird Survey monitoring and has been Red Listed as a species of Conservation Concern. The reasons for this drastic decline are many, but changes in farming practices are mainly to blame.
Although a species that most people associate with wetlands, lapwings can and do breed on arable farms but mainly on those which practice spring cropping. On arable farms, such as Hope Farm, cropping practices changed radically in the 1980s with a widespread change from spring-sown to autumn-sown crops.
Lapwings need bare ground to nest on and a mosaic of grass and crops at different heights and densities to raise their chicks in. Thick and uniform autumn crops, which are often well-grown by the time lapwings begin nesting, have proved very unattractive to the birds. The loss of spring cropping, along with more efficient drainage, prompted a large decline in arable-nesting lapwings.
So it was a fantastic moment in 2006 when lapwings nested on Hope Farm after an absence of many years. This was linked to a large area of the farm being in set-aside, but also to the return of spring cropping.
That year, we started growing field beans which we sow in spring. The lapwings raised two chicks in 2006 and have held territory nearly every year since. This year we have been particularly lucky to have two pairs on the farm, both in spring-sown field bean fields.
As if this wasn’t good enough, Derek Gruar, the Senior Research Assistant at Hope Farm, reported that the lapwings in one field were acting as if they had chicks. Derek confirmed this several days ago, and today we managed to find the female with two small chicks. It will still be several weeks to go before these chicks are capable of flight, but in a season of poor and often gloomy weather this ray of good news has really brightened our day, and hopefully yours too.