Lapwings

 A light spring mist lies across the lush green grazing marshes of Essex. The tiny herd of cattle stare me down with curiosity as I begin walking across the open field, the morning dew soaking off the grass onto my trousers. A cuckoo calls distantly, one of the closing headliners of the fading dawn chorus. I am looking for something else.  I am alerted to the presence of the bird I am looking for by its alarm call. It lifts into the air on broad, square wings, black and white, climbing quickly and turning sharply, and bears down on me, whistling its curious electronic whistle. The adult Lapwing makes several passes over me, close enough to let me know I am not wanted in its territory, but never close enough that I feel in danger of being pecked.  Its underside is bright white, its wingtips black, its eyes fixed on the potential danger, and its call almost otherworldly, to my mind recalling science fiction ray-guns, or Clangers, perhaps.  To others it may be the archetypal sound of the British countryside in May and early June. The reason for the adult Lapwing not wanting me there, and its reluctance to leave, is close by, at the muddy margin of a small pond, once a creek now cut off from the tidal river, pecking around in the mud. A tiny, awkward, fluffy chick, with a crown of mottled brown and a white collar, it’s one of the few chicks in whose downy plumage one can see the markings of the adult. A tiny, precarious little life, prodding around in one of the few remaining sections of its habitat in the county. The landowners here are rightly proud of their breeding Lapwings, and of the habitat they live in, and go to considerable lengths to protect these birds.

Lapwing, Speyside, Scotland, May 2023

Breeding Lapwings are not a typical part of the countryside in South East England. They have declined significantly since the 1950s, with the advent of intensive farming, and the loss of grazing marshes. They tend to do well on nature reserves managed for them, with water levels and grazing tightly controlled, and predators controlled or else excluded by metres and metres of electric fencing. Where I am now, a long way from Essex, North of the Border and then some, in the lush, green glens of Strathspey, Lapwings, and other farmland waders, are still a feature of the wider landscape, where lower intensity farming methods persist, though conservation organisations build links with farmers to promote their conservation. Elsewhere, small numbers of dedicated farmers and landowners are supporting the Lapwing’s return to the wider countryside, but they face an uphill struggle. They require very specific management, with grass short enough to allow a nesting adult a line of sight, for early identification of ground predators. They are highly vulnerable to predators, especially where shrinking colonies no longer allow a coordinated mobbing response.  They prefer shallow, standing fresh water in their nesting fields to persist into June and July to allow the chicks to feed, and cannot tolerate complete dessication of the soil, a challenge in times of changing climate.

Lapwing, Speyside, May 2023

To many birders Lapwings are very familiar, particularly from their wintering aggregations, their big flocks wheeling in the sky, turning from green-black to brilliant white as the birds bank and turn to evade a passing Peregrine or a Marsh Harrier. They are one of winter’s great spectacles. I recall immense flocks wheeling skyward against a backdrop of distant skyscrapers and wind turbines at Rainham Marshes on the edge of London many times.  One winter flock might comprise locally bred individuals, alongside birds from the near continent and beyond. A study from the Netherlands found that Dutch birds travelled to England, and to North Africa for the winter before returning to the same Dutch fields in Spring. They are individually faithful, as far as we can tell, to their wintering sites, but sometimes snowfall or other severe weather can displace them, and they need to undertake movements South and West to find food. They are largely short-range migrants.  Sometimes their flocks can be seen overflying even urban areas as they search desperately for a gap in the snow.

Lapwing, Lincolnshire, 2021

They are one of those birds which were they scarce or rare we would look at in absolute wonder. They’re a member of the Plover family, perhaps feral pigeon sized, topped with a smart black crest, over a friendly looking face in black and white, with big dark eyes and a short bill. Their undersides are white, and their back a palette of iridescence, mostly green but with notes of red and purple depending how they catch the light. Back in 2011 and somewhat blasé about Lapwings, given the large wintering numbers at some of my local patches, I was a volunteer at the Gialova Lagoon in Greece, where, one bright September day, in the heat, I encountered a Lapwing on the edge of some scrubland, and told my supervisor, she went running off after it, and came back cock a hoop to have found such a beautiful and unfamiliar bird.

Lapwings, RSPB Rainham Marshes, Greater London, 2011

But again, with such a decline in their breeding population, their wheeling summer displays and territory holding electronic sounding calls in an English, or even a Scottish summer, may become confined to specially managed reserves, or worse, a thing of the past. And, while managing for them is not easy, and can be costly, and thankless, it would be a great sadness not to see and hear that. And some people are investing the resources and energy required for Lapwings to return to the Essex countryside. And indeed, later in the season, when I returned to that site, the chicks had become two flighted juveniles, short crested, scaly backed versions of their parents, and it was great to see them making their way across the sea wall, to the Saltmarsh, to feed up on the wealth of shoreline invertebrates, before moving on, to wintering grounds near or far.

Emperors of the Moor.

 I love the big Saturniid moths. Ever since I was a kid and I got to watch an Indian Moon Moth emerge from its cocoon at home, a story of which my parents love to remind me, I have loved the big Saturniids, their big, ornamented, often bright green caterpillars, their silk-spinning and their cocoons, a palace for their pupae, and the big furry faces of the adult moths, with their dark compound eyes, their soft and luxuriant looking fur, and their surprisingly appealing faces.  Huge, patterned wings of eye spots, translucent windows and elegant pastel colours. The Saturniid moths are heavy duty night butterflies of immense beauty.   Although a group of them are called ‘Giant Silk Moths’ they are not closely related to Bombyx mori the domestic species so brutally harvested to make ties and party dresses. They are big, widely distributed, heavy moths, and the family includes the largest moth in the world, the Giant Atlas Moth (Attacus atlas).

Here in Europe, and Britain especially, we have something of a paucity of Saturniid moths. While the beautiful Spanish Moon Moth (Graellsia isabellae), a species I dream of seeing in the wild, lives in Mediterranean Europe, and the Tau Emperor (Aglia tau) sits just across the channel as close as Northern France and Germany, we only have one breeding Saturniid in these islands, and it is far from the biggest of them. However, the Emperor Moth, Saturnia pavonia, is a stunning beast, no less.  Males are finely patterened with rich grey forewings with eye spots, and purple fringing, and just a hint of a snakes’ head pattern on the wingtips, recalling some of its giant relatives. Their hindwings are orange, with dark veins like window lead, and another set of eye spots.  The females are grey, but no less spectacular, slightly larger, broad in the abdomen, and retaining the dark venation, with purple notes like the heather over which they fly. The eye spots are presumably aposematic colouring to threaten potential predators, and do look owl-like. The highly active males patrol the heather and grassland on sunny days in April and May. First impression is of an orange moth, the colour of its hindwings, often part concealed at rest. Having done all their eating as larvae, adult emperors do not feed, representing just a short-lived dispersal stage to mate and produce eggs.  Males spend their lives frantically looking for an opportunity to breed before their stored supply of energy runs out.  Their broad, feathered antennae serve to detect the chemical signals given off by females. Antennae provide a way of distinguishing the sex of Saturniids, under less pressure to detect chemical signals over long distances, the females have relatively thin antennae.  These moths can be attracted using a pheromone lure, designed to imitate the chemical signals of a female Emperor Moth. It works on similar principles to lures used to control pest species like Codling Moth or House Moths, but we were not using it to harm the moths, merely as an opportunity to observe and marvel.  When we, myself and a few colleagues from Butterfly Conservation, hung up the pheromone lure, from a fence in a little birch-and-heather patchwork not far from Aviemore in the Cairngorm Mountains, the male Emperors were with us in minutes.  Confused, they searched for the female, perching up on pines, posts and people, fluffy winged bundles of sexual frustration. The source of their confusion was soon taken away and repackaged, the moths’ energy reserves are valuable, and, the onlookers satisfied with excellent views, the moths melted out over the heather moorland once again.

Emperor Moth, Aviemore, May 2023

Females are relatively sedentary, seldom wandering far from their host plant, retaining their energy to distribute their eggs, and to escape from predators should the need arise.  They need to save their resources. As such, their lifespan tends to exceed that of the males, sometimes spending 10 days on the wing. A proximity to the host plant and a sedentary lifestyle saves them the active hunt for somewhere to lay that is a part of the lives of longer-lived lepidoptera, and like most Saturniidae, they don’t seem interested in finding the correct host plant. Fortunately, the larvae have fairly broad tastes, munching on heathers, birch, bramble and several other plant species, contributing to their surprisingly wide range in the UK, from the Highlands to open country in Essex and Kent, and down to Cornwall.

Upon hatching, the larvae are black and hairy at first, growing quickly, until by high summer the caterpillars are well grown and magnificent. A large Emperor Moth larva is bright green, studded with dayglow yellow, or sometimes other colours, points like gemstones, each surrounded by hairs, or perhaps bristles. It spends its summer eating, before spinning a cocoon, undergoing its final moult, and becoming a pupa. It overwinters in this state, as like all lepidoptera its body is essentially turned to soup and rebuilt into its final form. In Spring the moth emerges again, through a unique one-way valve in its cocoon, in contrast to other Saturniids, which instead produce chemicals to melt a hole through their silken palace. Then they face the world and fly, the cycle beginning anew.

Emperor Moth Larva on Orkney

Keep an eye out from April-early June for the Emperor Moth. They can be seen across the country, I have encountered it on the coastal marshes of Essex, the West Country heaths, up here in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, and even, as a fat green, yellow-studded, heather munching larva, next to the Ring of Brodgar on the Isle of Mull.  Sometimes the larvae are easier to find than the moth, and tend to be active at the times of year we’re taking our summer holiday, so take a look for them too. In heather habitats their bright green colouration and markings make them surprisingly easy to spot.  And be impressed, by our only native Saturniid moth. A truly magnificent beast.