They say familiarity breeds contempt and each spring I certainly feel a little antagonistic towards the masked lapwings which prove a nuisance on my walks.
It’s a familiar story. We all know in the suburbs and outer suburbs what it is like to be buzzed by the lapwings, commonly called plovers in Tasmania.
In fact the birds, despite having yellow spurs on their wings, are incapable of causing injury, it just appears that way when they swoop with noisy menace if people stray too close to their nests or young.
So ubiquitous are lapwings that over the years I have paid their natural history scant attention.
That changed early last month when I came across a female lapwing preparing a nest in an open space close to the Pipeline Track below Ridgeway. A day later I saw the lapwing had laid four light-brown, speckled eggs and, shuffling her body, was preparing for the long and patient process of incubating them.
It occurred to me at the time that I had no idea how long it would be before the chicks emerged, or if the female incubated the chicks alone.
I only saw one lapwing at first, but a second soon emerged, sharing the incubation duties.
Foolishly, I did not take a note of when I first saw the eggs and so I could not anticipate when they might hatch. Reading up on lapwings for the first time, I learned incubation takes about 30 days and so after a few weeks while I started to visit the nest daily in the hope of seeing the chicks at large.
During this time, the bird on the nest eyed me suspiciously, no doubt wondering who was this strange creature turning up each morning just to stand and stare.
It felt like I had been visiting the nest for ages, probably more than 30 days, and I began to wonder if there was something wrong with the eggs, they might be infertile and the lapwings were wasting precious time in trying to incubate them.
This seemed such a shame because when I found the nest I had speculated that the birds would not have a great chance of success nesting so close to the track, which is especially busy at weekends.
Lapwings nest early and it is common to see tiny chicks in their pied plumage darting about open spaces towards the end of August. The chicks are fully mobile as soon as they hatch.
I became increasingly worried when the chicks failed to appear by January 31 but a day later, with the birth of spring, I was rewarded with the sight of all four of them.
And true to form, the lapwings that had remained quiet, trying to stay hidden during the incubation process took to the wing, squawking and dive-bombing, sending me on my way.