This blog is from Luke and recounts his experience at North Warren over the breeding season.
“When you’re laying on your front, stealthily hidden, binoculars to your eyes, surrounded by the sounds, sights and smells of spring, aiming to get a peek into the daily lives of lapwing at North Warren, you know you’re a part of something special. That’s a snapshot of my experience thanks to the opportunity I have had for 2.5 months during spring to look into possible reasons for the decline of this charismatic species at the reserve.
To explain a little; I am a student at Leeds University studying for an environmental degree and opted for a year in industry, to gain better practical experience of habitat management. This brought me to Minsmere where I was a Residential Volunteer over winter – a position thoroughly enjoyable! I was then looking for a project to form my 3rd year dissertation and was given the option of researching lapwing populations and their habitat. Over the past 20 years at North Warren, breeding pairs have hit a peak of 58 but more recently have experienced numbers more in the region of 15 with the lowest number at 13.
Recent thinking by the wardens is that the decline is a combination of both a change in vegetation due to the brackish influence of the sea and predation. My job was therefore to conduct research on the marshes with the aim of better understanding the causes into breeding lapwing decline.
We monitored lapwing every few days, looking at their behaviour and identifying any nests that were marked for easy monitoring in the ensuing weeks. I devised two surveys to gain insight to habitat conditions on areas lapwing have bred over the past 20 years. The first looked at vegetation height and involved measuring the length of sward and amount of bare ground and water – all are factors a lapwing will consider when locating a nest. The second survey was messy! Two soil samples were removed from each of 17 fields studied and taken back to my make-shift ‘lab’ (a workbench in the Minsmere workshop!), where I dissected the soil and recorded all the invertebrate species that were present. The idea of which was to take a close look at how good the food resources are.
Once nested, we placed a few cameras out on our 11 nests and found that 1 hatched successfully, 8 had been predated and 2 had an unknown reason for failure. So clearly this suggests a predation threat that comes after nesting. Although I am yet to perform any statistics on my data, the preliminary results point towards a high presence of Salt Rush (Juncus gerardii), which suggests a shift from a lowland wet grassland habitat to a high level salt marsh community which is not ideal habitat for nesting lapwing.”
During the routine checking of the nest cameras, Luke was lucky enough to come across the freshly hatched brood (pictured above) from the only monitored nest which hatched. Unlike many garden birds which will stay in the nest for several weeks, lapwing chicks leave the nest within a few hours of hatching, so to come across this was a very special event.