Lapwing populations have declined by over 50 percent in the UK since the 1970s due to agricultural intensification, with individual nesting attempts vulnerable to a range of preventable welfare threats.
Individual lapwing welfare during the breeding season is affected by nest destruction from agricultural machinery, predation of eggs and chicks from foxes and corvids, and chick starvation from lack of invertebrate prey in intensively managed grassland. Nest destruction by machinery kills partly-incubated eggs and is a welfare harm to adults that have invested considerable energy in nest establishment and defence. The dramatic fall in successful lapwing breeding attempts represents cumulative welfare harm across millions of individual breeding attempts. Agri-environment schemes that pay farmers to delay operations, protect identified nest sites, and maintain suitable chick habitat directly reduce individual welfare events that are currently occurring at enormous scale.