A study on the breeding habits of Red-wattled Lapwing Vanellus indicus Boddaert, 1783 (Aves: Charadriformes: Charadridae) in the agricultural landscape of Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, India

: This study investigated the breeding biology of Red-wattled Lapwing Vanellus indicus in the agricultural landscape of district Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, India, during three consecutive breeding sessions (2019–2021). A maximum of 25 nests and average clutch sizes of 3.64 ± 0.49 were recorded in 2021. Hatching success estimated using the Mayfield method was 55% in 2019, 64% in 2020, and 65% in 2021; values obtained using the traditional method were 42%, 58%, and 53%, respectively. During 2019 and 2021, 3.8% and 3.3% (respectively) of eggs did not successfully develop, while no hatching failures were recorded in 2020. In total, 32% of eggs were destroyed during the study period by predators (cats, dogs, and foxes), and an average of 15% of eggs were destroyed due to anthropogenic activities such as agricultural practices. Red-wattled Lapwings displayed cryptic behavior and active defense against predators making them a successful open nesting species.


Study area
The present study was carried out in the agricultural landscape in three villages of Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, India: Ghisukhera (29.5795°N, 77.6035°E), Chokra (29.5875°N, 77.5820°E), and Charthawal (29.5440°N, 77.5920°E) ( Table 1; Image 1). About 60% of the area of these villages is occupied by agricultural land where seasonal commercial crops such as sugarcane, wheat, rice, and fodder grasses are cultivated. The temperature varies from 35°C in summer to 14°C in winter, with an annual average temperature of about 25 °C. The area receives about 120 mm rainfall annually (in monsoon).

Methods
The study was carried out in three agriculture fields during the lapwing breeding session (March-June). To assess breeding parameters (Sethi et al. 2011), key parameters including pairing, nesting, egg laying, incubation, and hatching were studied in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Data were collected in the morning (0700-1100 h) and evening (0400-0600 h) at two day intervals. In total, 10 visits were made to each study site, and observations were recorded using a Nikon Coolpix P1000 camera.

Data Analysis
Data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and t-test as described by Clark (2007). MS Image 1. The study area of the agricultural landscape in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh. Source: Google Maps.

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Office Excel (version 10) was used for the data analysis. We used Mayfield's method to reduce error and biases in the determination of egg hatching success (Mayfield 1975;Johnson1979) according to the formula: Hatching success = 1 -(total number of failed nests ÷ total number of exposure days) ×100 Lapwing egg hatching success was also calculated using the traditional method formula: Hatching success = (No. of Eggs hatched/Total No. of eggs laid) X 100

Results
The results showed that the Red-wattled Lapwings started breeding in April in the study area and continued until June. We observed that when female lapwings incubate the eggs, males protect the nest, and vice versa.  Table 2).
The hatching success during the period with the Mayfield method was found to be 55.10% in 2019, 63.90% in 2020, and 64.5% in 2021. The hatching success rates with the traditional method for the eggs hatched were 41.77%in 2019, 57.58% in 2020, and 52.75% in 2021. Un-hatched eggs or hatching failure was also reported during the study; hatching failure was 3.80% in 2019 and 3.30% in 2021. However, no hatching failures were recorded in 2020 (Table 3). The results indicated that an average of 32.11 % of lapwing eggs were destroyed during the study period (2019, 2020, and 2021) by predators (cats, dogs, foxes). Similarly, 14.82% of eggs were destroyed due to anthropogenic activities such as agricultural practices during the study period (Table3).

Discussion
In the present study, we found that the breeding period of Red-wattled Lapwing ranged from April to June, with a peak in April. Some previous studies (Kumar et al. 2011;Sethi et al. 2011) were conducted in the plain areas of Haridwar, and our results on breeding season support their findings. The breeding parameters of Lapwing species, clutch size (3-4 eggs), the average number of eggs hatched (2-3 eggs), and the incubation period (25-30 days) recorded in the present study are very close to those reported by previous studies (Desai & Malhotra 1976;Ali & Ripley 1998;Sethi et al. 2011) conducted in different regions of India.
In our study, we found that the agricultural landscape is very suitable for the lapwing breeding success; maybe the open harvested ground is not attractive to livestock, and the harvested land soil serves as an effective camouflage against the predators. However, in some cases, cattle reportedly crushed the eggs of ground- www.threatenedtaxa.org The Journal of Threatened Taxa (JoTT) is dedicated to building evidence for conservation globally by publishing peer-reviewed articles online every month at a reasonably rapid rate at www.threatenedtaxa.org. All articles published in JoTT are registered under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise mentioned. JoTT allows allows unrestricted use, reproduction, and distribution of articles in any medium by providing adequate credit to the author(s) and the source of publication.