The nesting season is in full swing, and our tagged Northern lapwings are doing everything they can to leave a legacy this year. All nine lapwings we’ve been tracking for a second consecutive year have begun nesting, and two have already successfully raised chicks. In addition, we’ve tagged nearly thirty new individuals, including a few males. With a bit of luck, this means we’ll continue to have plenty of data for analysis and commentary. Unfortunately, losses continue as well—Belinda’s and Kikina’s transmitters fell silent within days of each other for unknown reasons, reducing our returning group to just seven active birds. Let’s hope they and their transmitters hold up for as long as possible! Given the current season, today’s blog naturally focuses on nests—their survival, the stories of those that failed, and what we can learn from them. 
Figure 1: Nest of Northern Lapwing.
When and How Lapwings Nest
In our region, lapwing nesting typically begins in late March and can extend into early June under favorable conditions. However, in recent years—marked by warm early springs and dry conditions—the season has shifted. Nesting starts earlier, as birds take advantage of warm weather, but it also ends sooner, as suitable open habitats quickly become overgrown with dense, impenetrable vegetation.
Since lapwing egg incubation lasts around 27 days, the nesting window is relatively long. Unlike many bird species, lapwings in the best case raise only a single brood per season, though exceptions have been recorded (Parish & Thompson, 1997). That means most later nests are replacement attempts after an earlier failure.
Success and Failure: A Look at the Numbers
Among the 11 nests started by our returning lapwings this year (as of May 14), only two have successfully hatched chicks. Two are still active, and the rest failed. While this is too small a sample for robust conclusions, we can turn to a broader dataset for insight.
Between 2013 and 2024, with help from many colleagues, we’ve collected data on over 1,000 lapwing nests across the Czech Republic. Only about 41% of nests with a known outcome successfully hatched chicks. Daily nest mortality—a more accurate measure for estimating survival—averaged 2.7%. In other words, each day, there’s a 2.7% chance a lapwing will lose its nest.
Of course, this risk isn’t uniform. Mortality rates vary depending on crop type and other factors. We’ll explore those in future posts. Today, we focus on the main causes of nesting failure—and how we might prevent them.
Farm Machines and Predators: The Main Threats
Historically, lapwing eggs were collected for culinary purposes. In 1896, Josef Wiel mentioned them in his “health cookbook” alongside crow eggs as “a delicacy for which one pays dearly”. While the practice is now mostly symbolic, it continues in parts of the Netherlands, where lapwing egg-collecting remains a traditional springtime activity—and a unique source of long-term phenological data (Both et al., 2005).
Nowadays, however, the two main culprits behind failed nests are agricultural machinery and predators. If a lapwing nests in winter crops or sprouting maize, it’s likely to be left alone—fertilizer and pesticide applications typically don’t destroy the nest. But if the nest is on ploughed or freshly harrowed fields, chances are grim. In our dataset, 29% of nests were on ploughed fields, and 20% on fields prepped for sowing. These are at extreme risk unless located and protected.
A proven method is to mark nests with bamboo sticks, about 5 meters from each side of the row (see Fig. 2), allowing tractors to avoid them. Studies show that stick-marking doesn’t increase predation (Zámečník et al., 2017), making this a simple but effective protection method. However, it’s time- and labor-intensive, so it only has wide-reaching potential if many people get involved. That’s why Czech Society for Ornithology runs public workshops where volunteers learn how to protect nests in the field (link).
Figure 2: Nest protection from agricultural machinery. a) A tractor weaving between lapwing nests marked with bamboo sticks. b) A view of a marked nest that has been successfully avoided by agricultural machinery
Who’s Raiding the Nests?
Predation is the other major threat. Most predators are nocturnal mammals. Of 50 nest predation cases documented using incubation dataloggers, 42 occurred at night. Video footage (Fig. 3) revealed the culprits in 22 cases: 15 foxes, 4 stone martens, and one each of wild boar, badger, and hedgehog (Brynychová et al., 2020). The only avian predator recorded was the nocturnal Eurasian eagle-owl, which didn’t go for eggs—it killed the incubating female, leaving feathers and one of its own flight feathers as evidence.
Interestingly, corvids and daytime raptors were absent from the list. Lapwings defend their nests aggressively during the day, mobbing intruders. At night, however, they sit quietly until the very last moment (see Fig. 3 a). 
Figure 3: Examples of predators caught in the act. a) A red fox in close proximity to a lapwing female that continues incubating. b) A red fox holding a lapwing egg in its mouth. c) A stone marten predating a lapwing nest. d) A European badger inspecting the camera at the nest site.
Other Hazards: Hooves, Rain, and... Rocks?
Apart from these "usual" mishaps, a nest can of course be affected by a variety of other misfortunes. For example, a generally harmless and entirely herbivorous animal may destroy a nest simply by stepping on it. Lapwings are to some extent able to defend against this as well, or rather, they try to lure the approaching trampler away from the nest (see Fig. 4). At least in open landscapes, where the density of potential tramplers is low, this tactic can be sufficiently effective. The situation is different, however, on pastures, where a livestock density higher than one animal per hectare already proves problematic, and four animals per hectare usually mean the certain destruction of most nests present (Sabatier et al., 2015). Interestingly, for instance, horses have shown to be much worse tramplers due to their innate playfulness than cattle, which are calmer by nature (Mandema et al., 2013). In our regions, lapwing nesting sites on pastures are rare (fewer than 3% in the above-mentioned dataset), which is perhaps a shame, as pastures can offer suitable habitat in many respects until late in the season. If lapwings do nest in a pasture, it is certainly worth considering direct protection measures—either by installing electric fencing around the nests or by leaving part of the pasture ungrazed until the chicks hatch.
Figure 4: Examples of incubating lapwings reacting to approaching potential tramplers. a) A lapwing trying to distract a roe deer and lead it away from the nest. b) A lapwing confronting a nearby grazing hare.
Nest failure may also result from adverse weather. While lapwings are capable of incubating their nests even during short-term snowfall, flash floods pose a major threat. If such rains arrive at an unfortunate time during nesting, they can cause extensive flooding and wash out already active nests.
A rather bizarre (though not uncommon) cause of egg loss is the inexperience (or perhaps rather the bad habit) of some lapwing parents of adding a sharp stone or at least a properly hardened clod into the otherwise soft and smooth nest lining. Such an addition can of course crack the eggs even during normal incubation, and this indeed happens quite often. Sometimes we find cracked eggs in the nest; other times, lapwings themselves take the damaged egg in their beak and remove it from the nest (something we’ve observed several times, both live and on camera footage). But why did we call this unusual nesting behavior a “bad habit”? It’s because even when you remove such objects during nest checks, lapwings will often roll in another similarly sharp item from the surroundings, and the risky game continues.
At the end of this gloomy list of disasters awaiting the poor eggs, it’s unfortunately necessary to add that the danger doesn’t end with the hatching of the fragile chicks—on the contrary. The causes of chick mortality will be the subject of a future blog post. For now, we can only wish our crested friends nerves of steel in their battle against the teeth of predators and the wheels of giant machines.
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