Looking for the lapwings

My first lapwing was disturbed from the nest.

She called so much that the whole of Connemara was appalled.

It's a poet's job to remember things for you. Sean Lysaght's lines connect with a whole cultural rite of passage, the Irish family holiday in the West. I was taken away/from the eggs at the centre/of her wild, scolding orbits.

Or Michael Longley, in a summer here at Thallabawn, watching his daughter Sarah puff a lapwing's breast-feather from her palm: I would remember tumblers/Above the water meadow,/The shimmer of white feathers/In the flower-dwarfing wind.

All the more disquieting, then, to go looking for lapwings along the damp margins of the duach, and not once to be ambushed by that clamorous panic in the sky. Were they there last year? Or the year before? I am ashamed not to know.

Across at the Shannon, Stephen Heery has been out along the callows, day after day, looking for lapwing in the short meadow grass

and finding no more than he did last spring. That was when he discovered that the 342 pairs counted in a survey in 1987 had dwindled to a not-much-more-than 70. Even before this collapse, BirdWatch Ireland had included the lapwing among our dozen most threatened breeding species, along with corncrake, hen harrier and barn owl.

To lose the pilibin seems unthinkable, when every winter sees them in huge flocks at the wetlands: 24,000 on the Shannon estuary, 15,000 on the callows. Thousands more find good feeding on pastures and in the rough land around bogs, and the winter population across the whole island could well exceed 250,000. But most of these are visiting from Britain and Europe, moving away from the cold.

The current estimate for our own breeding lapwing is 21,500 pairs down by some 40 per cent between 1970 and 1990. A more exact picture will emerge from the new Countryside Bird Survey, just launched by BirdWatch Ireland, in which some 200 specially trained volunteers have teamed up with Duchas research staff and wildlife rangers. They will repeat the survey annually, not least to monitor the success of REPS in making farms more wildlife-friendly places. Lapwing numbers have always responded, up or down, to changes in the landscape. "Of late years," wrote Dublin's John Watters in 1853, "it has somewhat diminished in numbers, in consequence of the great advance of drainage and reclaiming of waste lands in Ireland." In place of the "waste lands" came a mosaic of grassy meadows and ploughed fields, to which the lapwings adapted.

Their preference today, according to British surveys, is to sit on the nest in a field of spring-sown wheat, or even vegetables, which lets them see a predator coming, and then to move with the chicks into a nearby field with grass tall enough to hide them. Changes in the mix of grass and arable fields are suggested as one reason for the alarming decline 62 per cent in Britain's lapwing population.

The Shannon water-meadows haven't changed in centuries, which is what makes them such a treasure. Native grasses and wildflowers, growing without fertiliser, provide a short sward in early spring that obviously suits lapwings even better than springs-own cornfields or carrot-patches. The callows do, however, have unpredictable water-levels, and four consecutive years of April flooding, from 1991 to 1994, were a big, disruptive crisis for the birds.

Many, it now seems, may have simply moved to a new habitat abandoned peatland around Lough Boora, in the north of Co Offaly. Here Bord na Mona is helping to create new areas of wilderness, flooding parts of the cutaway bog to make lakes for waterbirds. At the Turraun Nature Reserve last July, I watched skeins of lapwing sifting down to join redshanks, ducks and grebes that breed along the lake margins.

These could have included some of the birds found, in May, nesting directly on bare peat, with little or no plant cover in any direction. Tom Cooney, a TCD botanist working with Stephen Heery on the callows survey, found 25 pairs of lapwing in this unsuspected hideaway. In the drainage channels around them, other waders were breeding ringed plover, sandpipers and snipe.

For the lapwings to nest on bare peat shows the priority of spotting the predator first. They make no attempt to hide their eggs, even on grass, but rely on communal effort to mob a hooded crow or kestrel, or even a fox.

Britain's RSPB is researching the impact of predators on lapwing and curlew, and studies in Northern Ireland are revealing. In Co Fermanagh, a watch on 80 lapwing nests found that those close to water were robbed of their eggs far more often, and by a wide range of mammals, rather than by crows or other birds.

Studies of curlew nests in the Antrim Hills and on islands in Lough Erne found more than 80 per cent of nests failing to hatch, mostly because of predation by gulls, crows and foxes. Such incredibly low survival helps to explain the severe decline in the North's population of curlews down by a quarter.

Predation is made easier as changes in farming concentrate the nesting of birds like lapwing and curlew into smaller areas. The addition of mink to our waterside mammals can't have helped. A study of predation among the midland waders seems a logical spin-off from the Countryside Bird Survey. Meanwhile, if readers know of any large colony of nesting lapwings which might just be refugees from the Shannon callows, they should telephone Stephen Heery at 0905-85647.