Thermal imaging in conservation

 Lapwings have had a tough time over many years, but many farmers and landowners are trying to help them--particularly by leaving areas in a suitable state for nesting. One way of doing this is by planting in late spring rather than late autumn so that the relatively bare fields are suitable for Lapwings to nest.

Such is the case on one of our farms and we have seen several pairs courting and ( we hope) nesting. However, farmers do need to make a living and land must be used for growing crops. Such was the case that this particular field needed to be drilled with seed this week. So Jenni and I paid an early morning visit to the field yesterday ( while the temperature was still low), with two of our thermal imagers, to look for Lapwing nests.

Using conventional methods--binoculars and telescopes, it can take a long time to find the well- comouflaged nests. But with the imagers we found the bright white image of nests with incubated eggs very quickly-so minimising the disturbance to the parent birds.

You can clearly see the hot eggs from quite a distance. On closer examination this is a beautiful clutch of 4 Lapwing eggs....

You can also get an idea from this picture, of how difficult these are to find with the naked eye. The next job was to mark the nests at a suitable distance which doesn't attract predators, but still enables the farmer in his tractor to avoid the nest when drilling the seed......

So after about half an hour we had found and marked 4 nests, and the final job was to report to the farmer and clarify to him where the markers were in relation to the nests. Farmer happy---Lapwings happy.

Fingers crossed that these eggs will hatch in the next few days.......then the real job for the parents will start as they try to protect the chicks from the many predators out there.