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The masked lapwing (Vanellus miles) is a large, common and conspicuous bird native to Australia (particularly the northern and eastern parts of the continent), New Zealand and New Guinea. It spends most of its time on the ground searching for food such as insects and worms, and has several distinctive calls.
Lapwing Incubating Its Eggs—A photograph for which in 1895 R. B. Lodge received from the Royal Photographic Society the first medal ever presented for nature photography. Eric Hosking and Harold Lowes stated their — incorrect — belief that this was the first photograph of a wild bird. [17]
The traditional terms "plover", "lapwing", and "dotterel" do not correspond exactly to current taxonomic models; thus, several of the Vanellinae are often called plovers, and one a dotterel, while a few of the "true" plovers (subfamily Charadriinae) are known colloquially as lapwings. In general, a lapwing can be thought of as a larger plover.
In species where both parents incubate the eggs, females and males vary in the way they share their incubation duties, both within and between species. In some pairs, parents exchange on the nest in the morning and in the evening so that their incubation rhythm follows 24-hour day, in others females and males exchange up to 20 times a day.
These lapwings breed in the dry season with peak breeding in March to May ahead of the monsoons. [15] The nest territory has been estimated, based on the distance to nearest neighbours, to be about 2.7 acres. [16] They lay four eggs in a ground scrape. [17] A nest in a clump of grass has been noted as exceptional. [18]
Plover eggs were a form of eggs as food, and a seasonal delicacy of western Europe. [1] Gathered from wild green-plover nests, [2] a practice called plover egging, these eggs were perceived to be particularly flavorful and were snatched up by avid rural foragers and, in turn, their urban customers, as soon as nesting season began each year.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific region says Wisdom, the world's oldest known wild bird, has returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to lay an egg. The bird was first tagged ...
On floating vegetation, above water up to 1m deep, the nest is shaped like a cup and made from plants. Long-toed lapwings in swampy areas have also been known to use a platform of mosses and weeds. [16] Female long-toed lapwings lay 1–4 brown or olive-coloured eggs with dark markings and incubate them for 27–30 days. [17]