Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Vital piece of a jigsaw
Preying on insects and preyed upon by hen harriers and merlin, the often-overlooked meadow pipit is a crucial part of the food chain
Meadow pipits are the feathered equivalent of the humble worm in some respects. They make up the bulk of the food for some other species, yet they also consume vast quantities of other living things by sheer virtue of numbers.
In the uplands, the meadow pipit is our most common summer visitor by a huge margin. Tens of thousands will summer in Teesdale every year, yet many people will walk the miles of footpaths and hardly give them a passing glance. They are the sparrows of the uplands. Before anyone shouts at me, I am aware they are not a sparrow, far from it. I only compare them to sparrows in that few people give them a second glance.
The pipit is very much an insect eater and has the typical slim bill associated with that trait. I say insects — anything that crawls or flies and is up to a few millimetres long is fair game to the pipit as it hunts through the vegetation and on the ground for the majority of its prey. The abundance of numerous fly species and caterpillars from countless moths make the heather moors the ideal place for the pipit during the spring and summer.
It’s here it makes its beautiful grass-lined cup of a nest, often tucked into a grass tussock for protection. The female lays around four or five eggs, quite dark brown in colour, then striped by even darker brown. They hatch in around 12 days or so and the young fledge within a couple of weeks.
They normally have a couple of broods per year, but I am aware that many years ago we had a plague of one of the micro moths and there were scores of birds still breeding in late August due to the sheer volumes of food available. The numbers that come here and the productivity of those birds is no accident. They are to numerous predators what worms are to the humble blackbird, thrush and countless other birds and animals.
These are common birds with a global population of around 12million. However, like almost every other species they are in decline. They stretch from Greenland in the north
to mid-france in the south and Russia in the east. Mainly, they are a bird of unimproved grassland, moorland or marsh. Summering in the uplands or rough pastures, in the winter they
“When displaying, they often rise up, then parachute down, singing as they do so”
either migrate to warmer climates or, in some cases, to the coast.
I would liken them to a shrunken lark in many ways, slightly darker in plumage but a very similar shape and lacking a crest on the head. They are a slim bird, weighing only about 18g. They are a darkish buff brown on the back with a much lighter underside, but they have darker stripes on both the back and breast.
The toe on the rear of the foot is also like the lark’s, noticeably long. When displaying, they often rise into the air some 30ft to 40ft or more, then parachute slowly down, singing as they do so. It’s something I never get tired of watching or listening to.
Common prey
The long list of species that rely on the pipit is a vital one. It contains a couple of the most important species that nest on the moors — the merlin and the hen harrier, both of which eat vast numbers of the unfortunate pipits.
The merlin, in particular, relies on this little bird as it is by far the most common prey species it will come across on its daily foraging missions. Prey samples found at merlin nests show a variety of other passerines, pied flycatchers, redstarts, stonechats, snipe and more, but the humble pipit is the ‘worm’. It is also preyed upon by both stoats and weasels and, long before they were protected, I saw four pipit chicks almost ready to fledge removed from the stomach of a large adder.
The pipit is an example of a little bird that is an essential cog in the machine we call nature. Rather understated, often overlooked, it is one without which the populations of so many other things would probably flounder were it not around in the sort of numbers we are accustomed to.
For humans and their management of the planet, it is one of the many pieces of a complex jigsaw that we would do well to take good care of. As with any jigsaw, if you lose certain pieces, the picture can never be complete.