Guest Feature: That Stubborn Bird
What lapwings can teach us about farming, food, and the future of nature
Today’s guest post comes from Carrie Starbuck, Director of Nature Recovery at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. Carrie works with farmers and landowners across southern England to bring nature back into the heart of food production.
Her piece on lapwings, the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust’s emblematic bird, is a reflection on what these stubborn little waders can teach us about farming, food, and hope. You can find more of her writing over on her Substack,
The Nature of Things where she shares stories from the frontlines of nature recovery.The team Whatsapp me a photo. It’s our two trainees, grinning like Cheshire cats, one of them holding a lapwing chick in the palm of her hand. They’ve been out ringing chicks and taking tiny samples of poo (very glamorous work) to understand what they’re eating so we can help create better habitat for them.
I’ve never been that close to a lapwing. For me they’re little happy dots, flitting in and out of floodplain meadows, their calls like laughter carried on the wind. But my delight on seeing that photo was the same as theirs - a jolt of joy at knowing this small, miraculous bird is still here, still trying.
At Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, the lapwing is our logo. It feels apt. They’re stubborn and spirited. They’re a bird that refuses to give up on the land even as the odds stack against it. Much like our charity.
For those not in Europe or Asia, lapwings are elegant, plump little waders about the size of a pigeon, with rounded wings, a green sheen to their backs, and a jaunty crest like a wayward quiff.
They were once the soundtrack of British meadows and spring mornings, known for their tumbling display flights and soft, laughing peewit call. But like most things that were once abundant, their numbers are now few.
Over the past eighteen months, through our Project Peewit, we’ve been monitoring lapwing populations across Wiltshire, mapping where they still hold on and where their are gaps. It’s the most comprehensive dataset the county’s ever had.
It’s a map of both hope and loss.
And now, we want to take it further.
A Bird Worth Fighting For
Lapwings belong to a wider family of waders. A century ago, you could have found them almost anywhere that was slightly wet: in damp pastures, floodplains, and the rough edges of mixed farms.
But the UK has lost over 90% of its wetlands since the Industrial Revolution, drained for agriculture, flood control, and development.
Faced with a vanishing home, lapwings did something extraordinary… they adapted.
They traded the lush sprawl of wet meadows for the stripped geometry of arable fields, scraping their nests into bare patches of spring crops between young shoots of barley or beans.
For a while, it worked. The open ground gave them long sightlines to spot danger, mostly foxes and crows, who consider lapwing chicks an easy meal, while the damp soil still held worms and beetles, and nearby livestock stirred up flies and life.
A lapwing’s ideal home looks, at first glance, like nothing special: a wet, open field with short grass, patchy soil, and plenty of invertebrates.
They love the scruffy corners, the shallow puddles, and grass kept short enough to stay alive but not smother. They’re social birds too, happiest nesting near others, their calls a soft chorus of optimism across the fields.
But as farming intensified with earlier sowing, fewer fallows, and faster machinery, that fragile compromise broke.
The ground became too tidy, too uniform and too efficient. Since the 1980s, lapwing numbers have fallen by around 60%, and in some parts of southern England, the decline has been even steeper.
They became, in many ways, the bird that refused to leave the farm, even as the farm stopped making room for them.
Chalkland Revival - Rewriting the Story
Through Project Peewit, we now know where lapwings still breed and, crucially, where they don’t.
That knowledge has fed directly into Chalkland Revival, our ambitious partnership funded by Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL). It brings together five farm clusters (including my own) covering more than 40,000 hectares of chalk landscape across the North Wessex Downs, all working to bring back lapwing and other farmland birds.
Here, farmers are rewriting the story. Together, we’re trialling interventions such as small-scale predator control, brood-cover strips sown with tussocky grasses, and the restoration of damp corners and unproductive hollows.
One farmer told me, only half joking, that he’s now more emotionally invested in his lapwings than his winter wheat.
And perhaps that’s the point.
Feeding the Future
The fate of the lapwing isn’t a story about one bird. It’s a mirror held up to our food system. Our landscapes are shaped by what we eat and how we choose to value it.
When cheapness becomes the highest goal, something always pays the price whether that’s soil, water, wildlife, or the thrill of a lapwing call.
Lapwings are resilient, but they can’t thrive in a world that prizes efficiency above all else. They need untidy corners, messy margins, a little benign neglect. They need insects, which means they need soil that’s alive.
In our monitoring, we’ve seen that only a small fraction of chicks survive to fledging in intensive arable landscapes, sometimes as low as 30%. Not because farmers don’t care, but because the system rewards tidiness and throughput, not abundance and care.
It’s a strange paradox: the bird most loyal to farmland now depends on a food system that often leaves no room for it.
We’ve built a way of feeding ourselves but starves the land.
And yet, like the stubborn lapwing, we refuse to give up.
All across the country, farmers are experimenting with new ways of balancing productivity and life. They’re testing regenerative methods, diversifying rotations, welcoming back roughness and water.
Through the next phase of Project Peewit, we’ll be combining science, data, and farmer knowledge to target action where it matters most. Lapwings are telling us where the land still wants to be wet and wild, if we’ll let it.
Because here’s the thing.
When you make space for lapwings, for life, everything else follows.
The soil breathes, the insects hum, the wetlands begin to piece themselves back together.
Even our food becomes richer, not just in nutrients, but in meaning.
Every farm that holds a lapwing nest is feeding more than people. It’s feeding a future where farming and nature are not opponents, but co-conspirators.
And somewhere in a field, a trainee with a grin as wide as the horizon is holding a tiny bird in her hand, reminding us what all this is for
For more of Carrie’s writing on farming, nature, and the work of restoration, head to The Nature of Things and hit subscribe.
We have lapwings. Or we did. Our neighbours have just staged a massive "tidy up", so now, who knows?
We're just down the road from you, on the North Wessex Downs, but no one is remotely interested in our intense and beautiful wildlife population, because we're just tenants, just ten acres, and not part of one of the “clusters”.
We've been farming ‘regeneratively’ and for wildlife for 25 years, since before most people had heard the word, and no one gives a fig.
Oh well. The birds still love us!
At my childhood home we used to get lapwings visiting every winter. One year we didn't which I thought very strange, then later realised why – my mum used to keep horses, and their grazing and the wet weather offered the birds the kind of habitat you mentioned. When mum decided to let go of riding and the horses for good, the lapwings never came back.
Later in life that reiterated to me why things like conservation grazing is so important.