A painter’s flights of fancy

Next week, the Great Yorkshire Show celebrates the best that agriculture has to offer and I will be going to the show to look at what is new in farm conservation in modern farming practice.

More farmers are taking up the challenge of protecting the countryside and this spring I visited a farmer I know in Melbourne, Jeremy Kemp, who has been in a higher-level stewardship scheme for four years.

He put aside two five-acre strips for breeding lapwings and had invited me to come and see three nesting pairs.

Lapwings are beautiful, and their striking black and white plumes, delicate crest and iridescent sheen of green, blue and purple, make them attractive to paint.

When courting, they put on a tumbling performance in flight, which is fun to watch.

But they have been in decline since the 1950s. One of the problems is that they nest in large, open areas where vegetation is short.

I watched plenty during a trip to the Dales and it’s hard to see them nesting arable areas like East Yorkshire. The trend for autumn-sown crops means that they are usually too high by the time lapwings are looking to nest. So they choose ploughed fields where they run the risk of losing their eggs under the rollers.

My father, who in 1995 won one of conservationist’s most sought-after prizes, the silver lapwing award, for promoting wildlife at his farm in Givendale, used to mark out lapwing nests with flags to alert the drivers.

Jeremy had ‘disked’ his lapwing strip to create the right, ploughed, effect. But finding the nests in the freshly-turned earth proved difficult.

When we approached cautiously on foot, the birds flew off. We put a short cane in the ground to mark the spot, then searched around, treading carefully, of course. Just as I was beginning to give up all hope, I spotted a nest. They are superbly camouflaged in a simple scrape in the earth lined with dry grasses.

They are a sensitive bird and to watch them on their nests you need to be in a hide and inch it closer each day.

Rather than build a hide at the site, I brought a ready-made one of plywood and set it down 30 metres away from the nest. Then I returned to the edge of the field to make sure the female was okay about this new presence. Thankfully, she flew back and promptly settled down on her eggs without any apparent concern.

During the following week, I edged the hide closer and also found two other nests which I also marked with hazel twigs.

By the second week, my hide was only nine metres away from the nest and I got some great shots of the lapwing brooding.

She was very protective and one evening I watched her see off a family of starlings foraging a little too close to the nest, rushing at them furiously with her wings splayed. But what I was really after was some photographs of her with small chicks.

Timing is always difficult with lapwings since soon after they hatch they go off to forage for insects by themselves.

They don’t then return to the nest as the adult will brood them anywhere in the field. I realised there was a chance of this happening when one evening I looked in on one of the two nests marked with twigs and discovered four chicks had recently hatched. Two were still wet. So I hedged my bets and put up second hide on the nest that was still to hatch.

By now I was checking on the eggs at both hides daily and was just beginning to wonder if they would ever hatch when one evening I put an egg from the first nest to my ear and heard a faint cheeping and tapping. I arrived early the next day expecting to see the chicks, but there was just a small chip in each of the eggs.

To my dismay, the next day there was a downpour and the sun didn’t emerge until evening.

I headed down to the hide and found the chicks had hatched and I was able to get a few photographs.

It wasn’t what I had hoped for and so I headed off to the other nest. The eggs here were now chipping and when I returned the following morning, three chicks had hatched. They were still damp and one egg was still to hatch. At last, the moment I had been waiting for.

As I settled into the hide, the female lapwing arrived and began to shuffle about trying to make herself comfortable, all the while trying not to tread on her chicks.

It was amusing to see how she was unable to get on with the job until everything was just so. She tidied up, picked up an empty eggshell, flew off and dropped it about 30 metres away before she finally settled down.

As the morning wore on, she would stand up every so often to check the progress of her chicks, and by late morning, the three chicks had dried out and were taking their first steps on oversized, wobbly legs.

Two were quite adventurous, and by lunchtime had begun foraging missions of their own, pecking at insects and scratching about before getting tired and falling asleep in the sun. But she woke them with a call and encouraged them back under her.

After five hours in the hide I had my photographs and left the new family to their adventures. In three weeks I made 12 trips and clocked up 500 miles.

I am always very careful to cause as little disturbance as possible to nesting wild birds but over the years I have noticed that my presence at a nest has one positive consequence – it unnerves predators such as crows.