Where to see lapwing in the UK

How to find lapwing

Lapwing is the species on this site where the calendar helps you least. Across 39,413 occurrence records in the 13 counties covered here, the best month is April at 11.4% of records and the worst are September and November, tied at 6.9% — the whole year fits inside four and a half percentage points. Only two of the 54 species with curves here are flatter, and one of those rests on a single county's data. So the honest answer to when you should go and see one is more or less whenever, and the decision worth making is where.

That flat line is an average of opposites. Merseyside puts 16.3% of its 2,206 records into January alone, and Shropshire does much the same at 13.3%. Northumberland's two strongest months are June and July, level on 693 records each, and County Durham peaks in July. Six of the thirteen counties peak in April or May instead. Counted together, a winter bird and a summer bird produce a straight line that describes neither.

The explanation is that British lapwing are partial migrants rather than one settled population: northern breeders disperse after nesting, and lowland winter flocks are swollen by birds arriving from the near Continent. That is general ornithology, not something occurrence records can demonstrate. What the records do show is where each pattern lands.

Detection is doing some of the work in those figures too. A lapwing in April is a bird throwing itself around above a field and shouting about it. A lapwing in November is one shape in a flock standing motionless on wet plough. Record counts measure how readily people notice a bird as much as how many are present, and the spring counties are precisely where noticing is easiest.

Which brings up the thing nobody warns you about. A settled flock on bare plough looks like clods of earth, and goes on looking like clods until something puts it up. The plumage reads plain black and white at any range; the green is iridescent, so it appears only with the light behind you and drains away as you move. The crest is the first reliable clue, and on a bird facing away it is one thin line against the sky.

So commit to one visit or the other rather than splitting the difference. For behaviour, take wet grassland in late March or April and wait out the display flight — the wings throb audibly across a field, and the call that goes with it is a wheezing electronic squeal that sounds nothing like a wader. Otmoor in Oxfordshire and Saltholme on Teesside both hold breeding lapwing on restored wet grassland. For numbers, take flooded lowland grazing in midwinter: Pulborough Brooks in the Arun valley floods each winter and puts lapwing within scope range of its hides, and Venus Pool sits in one of the two counties whose records peak in January.

Two things the reserve page will not mention. Wet grassland is watched at range, so a telescope earns its weight here in a way it does not in a reedbed hide, and official photographs taken on long lenses flatter the distance badly. And in spring, keep to the paths even where the ground looks empty: lapwing nest in a scrape on open ground, and a bird held off its eggs by a walker is what the crows are waiting for.

Check your own county before planning around any of that. Thirteen of the fourteen counties listed below have a page of their own, each carrying its curve, and the gap between a January peak and a July peak is the gap between two completely different days out.