Autumn around us is in full splendour, and we can be grateful whenever the sun manages to break through the heavy fall clouds, if only for a moment, to recharge the sorely tried transmitters of the last lapwings (and especially the males) that haven’t yet moved on to sunnier wintering grounds. As for the stubbornly silent woodcocks, better not even mention them. Nevertheless, even though the ranks of lapwings lingering in Bohemia have thinned considerably, migration still can’t be considered over. It will be interesting to see whether any of the crests will beat last year’s record by Drahuše for the latest departure to the wintering grounds. We’re also eagerly waiting to see how many lapwings will still join the first four that have already pushed on to the distant Iberian Peninsula. For now, it looks like they’re not rushing into major movements from the French wintering sites, but there’s still time.
And while this year’s lapwing migration saga nears its peak, today’s text takes us back to spring, full of repeated attempts and frequent failures for lapwings. We’ll focus on those repeated efforts to raise a family of chicks and bring them successfully to fledging, the moment when any nesting attempt can be declared a success. In previous posts we discussed the fact that lapwing breeding success is unfortunately not big, and we analysed in detail all the obstacles in their way. Today we’ll turn to the lapwings themselves: the effort they invest in reproduction and how they respond to the setbacks they encounter in this difficult task. The transmitters we use can tell us a great deal about lapwing behaviour.
Figure 1: The Lapwing is choosing the right place for a new nest.
As attentive readers of these posts surely know, a lapwing (barring rare exceptions) is not capable of successfully bringing off more than one clutch in a single year. In theory she could just barely squeeze it in timewise, but there’s very little evidence that she even attempts such a feat. Even so, most lapwings during the breeding season attempt multiple clutches, responding to the loss of a nest or chicks at a time when laying again is still feasible. Among 59 lapwing-seasons we tracked, only 21 (36%) nested just once, 29 (49%) nested twice, and nine (15%) three times. It also must be acknowledged that the average of 1.79 clutches per season is surely underestimated, since we trapped lapwings during the season and some may have managed a nesting attempt before we caught them. Likewise, we didn’t manage to track all lapwings through to the end of the season (due to transmitter failure or the death of the bearer).
From the above it’s clear that if a lapwing loses a nest (or chicks) early enough, she doesn’t give up; when faced with the question “what to do with the rest of the breeding season,” she answers with another clutch. And that of course invites us to dive deeper. First, how long does it take a lapwing to shake off failure and start a new nest? And will she trust the originally chosen site (i.e., place the next nest nearby), or will she move to a different locality? And what about next year? Which place does a lapwing regard as her “home,” the one she’ll return to from the wintering grounds? Let’s answer all these questions with data and stories supplied by our crested friends!
When and Where?
So how long does it take a lapwing to recover from the loss of a nest (or chicks) and start nesting again? On average, just under two weeks (13 days), though most lapwings manage it faster (the median is only 11 days), and the speed record-holders Lulu, Quinoa, Sněhurka, and Amálka managed it within five days! By contrast, Brusinka hesitated a full 36 days before laying again. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no difference in the speed of re-nesting between females that lost a nest and those that lost chicks. Over the course of the season, however, the time required to establish a new nest grows longer. So even as the pressure on lapwings increases with each passing day on the calendar and with the growth of crops in the fields, the fatigue of the breeding season also takes its toll, and gathering the energy needed to produce a new clutch takes longer and longer. The last nesting attempts began in early June.
Another interesting aspect is the location where the female starts a new nesting attempt. Again, this is highly variable. Some females (such as the aforementioned Lulu and Sněhurka) nested again practically in the same place. Pipi, on the other hand, moved a full 347 kilometres to Poland. Very roughly we can say that in about a third of cases (18 out of 46; 39%) lapwings attempt another nesting on the same (or adjacent) field i.e., within one kilometre of the previous nest, in places they surely know intimately from moving around their breeding site. In another third (16; 35%) the move is within 10 km, i.e., within an area they may know well from longer excursions in the surroundings, which they sometimes make even during incubation. In the remaining cases (12; 26%) these are truly long-distance moves, often several tens of kilometres (Fig. 2). This breakdown is admittedly quite artificial, but it shows the range of possible decisions lapwings make about where to place their replacement nests.
Figure 2: Record holders in nest relocations.
The average distance lapwings move between nesting attempts does not change over the season, and despite an apparent trend it does not increase significantly with the time they need to establish a new nest. A completely unanswered question, however, is the role of males in these matters. Do whole pairs move together (even tens of kilometres)? There is good reason to doubt it. Males are the ones whose job is to defend their own territory and, ideally, to entice more than one female to nest there. Indeed, observations of our four males this year largely match this. For Lucifer and Kraken we observed no further nesting attempts; Drak and Uherák had their three replacement nests in total on the same field, within 200 meters of the nest where we trapped them. Of course this is a tiny sample, and it’s likely that if the suitability of a site changes dramatically during the season (e.g., it becomes too overgrown), males will also try their luck elsewhere. Still, the question remains to what extent whole pairs move together. We rather suspect (but it’s only a hypothesis) that a female’s longer-distance move also means leaving the male. Whether this is really the case will likely remain a major challenge for future telemetry studies. We’ll need to learn to catch whole pairs something we unfortunately don’t have much of a handle on at present.
Where to Return Next Year?
And now the crucial question to end with. When a lapwing returns from the wintering grounds, where does she go? According to our nine returnees this year, she heads to where she started (not where she ended) the previous year. All nine lapwings, upon return, spent at least some time more or less at the locality where we trapped them last year. We presume that in most cases we also encountered them last year during their first nesting attempt. And four of them set up their first homes this year within 100 meters of last year’s capture site. In other words, they returned not only to “their” field, but more or less to “their” territory. The record-holder in this regard was Lulu, who established a nest 20 meters from last year’s. Two more nested several hundred meters away, and the remaining three moved more than two kilometres. Even two kilometres is hardly a great distance when you consider that the crop on the original field is often unsuitable for nesting. We can therefore say that site fidelity in lapwings is considerable.
An interesting finding is that the “breeding site” to which lapwings express their fidelity appears to be specifically the place where they start the season, not the last nesting site of the previous year. Fifinka (Figure 3) illustrates this nicely: in both years she began at the site near Horní Ředice. In both years she was unsuccessful there, and so for the final nesting attempts she moved to various localities roughly 30 km away. Unfortunately, our sample is still quite small. But this is one of the aspects we’re very much looking forward to exploring with the next spring season!
Figure 3: Fifinka and her nest relocations.