and wide. Incubation takes 19 to 21 days, with both sexes sharing duties, although the male takes over as sole incubator as the eggs hatch and immediately afterwards. This is thought to allow the females to lay and incubate a second brood if the water and food in the lake persists. Parent birds incubate for one to six days before swapping with the other parent. These intervals are much longer than other waders, and thought to be due to the remoteness of food—either the prey are blown to remote corners of the lakes by the wind or the lakes themselves have receded as they have dried. Parents almost always changeover incubating at night, generally within two hours of nightfall, presumably to avoid predators. On hot days with temperatures over , incubating birds may leave briefly to wet their brood patches to presumably cool the eggs or young. Birds on nests always face into the wind. The nestlings are born covered in white down—unlike any other waders—and mobile with open eyes (precocial) and leave the nest soon after hatching (nidifugous). Adults lead the young birds to the water by the time they are two days old. Once in the water, they begin to feed on tiny crustaceans. Nest predators and hazards Banded stilt colonies suffer greatly from predation by silver gulls (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae), while wedge-tailed eagles (Aquila audax), white-bellied sea eagles (Haliaeetus leucogaster), spot-bellied eagle-owls (Bubo nipalensis) and black falcons (Falco subniger) also take stilts and young. Premature drying of the lakes leads to parents abandoning their eggs or nestlings, resulting in the deaths of many thousands of young. Feeding The banded stilt forages by walking or swimming in shallow water, pecking, probing or scything into the water or mud. The bulk of its diet is made up of tiny crustaceans, including branchiopods, ostracods (seed shrimp), anostraca (fairy shrimp) such as Artemia salina and members of the genus Parartemia, both genera of notostraca (tadpole shrimp), and isopods such as the genera Deto and Haloniscus. They also eat molluscs, including both gastropods such as the land snail Salinator fragilis and members of the genus Coxiella, and bivalves of the genus Sphaericum, insects (such as bugs, beetles, flies and flying ants, which they glean from the water surface), and plants such as Ruppia. Small fish such as hardyheads (Craterocephalus spp.) have also been reportedly eaten. Status and conservation In 2016, the banded stilt