Dear reader. You are now reading the first in a series of blog posts aimed at exploring various aspects of the lives of our lapwings, as revealed by the data we are continuously gathering. During the 2024 breeding season, we managed to capture and fit transmitters to 20 lapwings. Since the captures were carried out on nests, all the captured lapwings are females. Capturing males on nests is very rare (based on our experience, only around 3% of captures involve males). To date, all the lapwings combined have sent us over 600,000 GPS positions, not to mention other data. Every day, thousands more positions are added. This vast and rapidly growing dataset is gradually providing insights into an increasing number of facets of the lapwing’s life. At the moment, these are often interesting snippets, whose true scientific value will increase over time, as more data accumulates, and individual cases form broader patterns. However, a brief summary of the breeding season and the current situation is certainly in order.
Picture 1: Northern Lapwing with a transmitter.
We monitored all 20 tracked females over the course of 22 breeding attempts, of which 15 resulted in chicks hatching. However, only in six breeding attempts did the data suggest that at least one chick might have survived long enough to fledge. The exact number of chicks successfully reared by a given lapwing is usually impossible to determine. This is due to the height and density of the vegetation in which lapwings move in the late season, and also because it is not always possible to assign large chicks shortly before fledging to specific parents. Although these figures cannot, for many reasons, be considered an accurate estimate of the lapwing’s seasonal breeding success, they do indicate that the reproductive success of lapwings in today’s agricultural landscape is not particularly high. It will be interesting to see what numbers we come to in future seasons, when we hope to track the majority of females throughout the entire breeding season. At the same time, the data has already provided several interesting insights into the behaviour of lapwing families in our agricultural landscape. Would you believe, for instance, that lapwings are capable of leading their flightless chicks across large fields overgrown with metre-high, dense rapeseed?
Unfortunately, we have already lost five of the twenty captured females. Cácorka (I will refer to the lapwings by the familiar names we’ve given them) met her end on the road—she was hit by a car. Iris, who (probably along with her nearly-fledged chicks) was lingering on a small bare patch of land with un-germinated maize near a manure heap, was caught by a fox, as we could tell from the characteristic tooth marks found on her transmitter. Růža suffered (what for us currently an unspecified) catastrophe near Verdun in France. Since her last positions were sent from dense vegetation surrounding a small watercourse, we suspect she too was predated. And the transmitters of Queen and Hela have disappeared without a trace for unknown reasons, likely due to transmitter failure. Unfortunately, this is all part and parcel of tracking wild animals.
The breeding season has now definitively come to an end, and the time of migration has begun. Oliva was the first to embark on migration (on 23rd June), followed a day later by Etoša. In fact, migration started quite early, at a time when some females were still brooding unfledged chicks. As of today, six females have already left the country, all of which are currently in France. Interestingly, all the long-distance movements so far occurred between 23rd June and 19th July. Since then, all the lapwings have remained in place, and we are now awaiting the next "migration wave."
That’s all for today. From next time, we will dive into specific issues and phenomena in the lives of lapwings.