Are the Birds Flying North Again
As y'all wake upwards on a frosty wintertime morning, it's hard not to envy a swallow, 9,600km away in southern Africa with the dominicus on its back. Some of our swallows will spend this very day flitting around herds of grazing animals, such as elephants, buffalo and wildebeest, snapping up flying insects disturbed by the herbivores' feet. Once back in the UK, they will do the same around herds of cows.
About l species in all leave our shores each year on a substantial south journey, to spend the British winter in gentler climates. But at the same fourth dimension, many bird species – such every bit geese, swans and ducks – migrate to Britain in autumn, overwintering on our shores before leaving once again in spring.
So why exercise birds migrate? Where do birds migrate to? Which bird species arrive in the UK in autumn and which ones exit ahead of winter? Looking ahead, which bird species make it in spring and which ones leave before summer?
The different types of bird migration
To understand migration properly, there are a number of terms worth knowing most:
Seasonal migration
This is a movement betwixt breeding and non-breeding ranges. Summertime visitors arrive from the south and winter from the north.
Latitudinal migration
This is the migration from northern regions to southern, and vice versa.
Longitudinal migration
Especially mutual in continental Europe, this is the move of birds betwixt eastern and western regions.
Irruptions
Irregular migrations are caused by a lack of food and water, resulting in big numbers of birds flying to unfamiliar areas.
Nomadic migration
Like irruptions, these outcome from a lack of vital resources, only birds cover shorter distances and stay within a familiar range.
Altitudinal migration
This is a motility from high to low ground during the colder months, ordinarily over short distances. Skylarks do this.
Moult migration
During moulting flavor – often a vulnerable time for birds – species such as shelducks caput to safer grounds.
Migrate
On very rare occasions, migrating birds 'migrate' away from their normal routes as a effect of storms, for example bluethroats in Norfolk.
Opposite migration
This is most frequently seen in fall when young birds go dislocated, flying against their expected road.
Dispersal
This occurs when juvenile birds are forced to get out fledging grounds to discover new territory – it'southward not a true migration.
Guide to wintertime bird visitors
What are wintertime visitors?
Winter visitors are birds that arrive on Britain's shores in autumn, and then leave again in spring.
Why do birds migrate to Britain in fall and wintertime?
Winter visitors come to the UK from the north and e for the mild climate and abundance of food, then return north and eastward to brood.
Dissimilar types of winter visitors
Redwing
Similar in appearance to the song thrush and mistle thrush, the redwing is the smallest of the thrush species plant in Britain. It can be identified by the orangish-ruddy patches under its wings, and past the creamy stripe over its optics. Just a couple of pairs nest hither, with the majority arrive in hither in autumn to feed on berries, before leaving over again in March and April.
Fieldfare
The fieldfare is some other thrush that visits Britain in winter, larger than redwings and song thrushes, simply a niggling smaller than mistle thrushes. It tin be told apart by its grayness head and rump. They arrive here from October onwards, and being to return in March.
Bewick's swan
The Bewick's swan is the smallest of the swan species found in Britain, sheltering here in farmland, freshwater wetlands and coastal trophy. They travel 2,500 miles from Siberia, facing a number of challenges along the way including predation, illegal hunting, and the adventure of hitting power lines. In February 2021, a flock that had started their migration back to the Arctic were forced to return to Gloucestershire due to Storm Darcy.
Barnacle goose
This small goose has a creamy face, short neb and black neck and winters in Scotland, Ireland and northern England after convenance in Greenland and Svalbard. At that place'due south a small resident convenance group of ane,000 pairs. Winter population is 90,000.
Canada goose
Introduced from North America, there are now 62,000 pairs in the UK and the number is growing. Large and with a brown torso and blackness neck, information technology has become the UK'southward virtually familiar goose of park lakes. It is seen as a pest in some areas.
Pink-footed goose
This medium-sized goose resembles the white-fronted just has a night face and pecker and pink legs. Arriving from Greenland and Iceland, around 300,000 winter on the east coast, especially Norfolk, though some 50,000 choose Lancashire'southward declension.
Black-tailed godwit
One of our largest waders, with long legs and a long bill for probing in mud for worms and snails. Orange-brown in summer, it has grey winter plumage with black-and-white fly confined noticeable in flying; 44,000 from Iceland spend winter in the UK.
Sanderling
A tiny scuttling sparrow of the sandy shore that seems to trip the light fantastic toe in and out as the waves lap the beach. Information technology is a winter visitor so we but become to see its grey-white colouring and not the gorgeous tortoiseshell plumage of summer; it breeds in the Arctic.
Swell northern diver
Swell northern divers are idea to be the oldest bird species in the globe. Large and powerful, their red eyes may help them see underwater on fishing dives upward to 60m deep. They breed in Due north America and winter on Atlantic shores, gathering in large numbers around the due north-due west coast of Scotland. A stiff north-westerly wind, withal, can push them south.
Bohemian waxwing
Arriving in minor flocks from central Europe, these exotic peach-tinged birds with blackness eyeliner and debonair crests are a sign that it'due south fifty-fifty colder on the continent than information technology is here. Waxwings beloved hedgerow berries.
Guide to summer bird visitors
What are summer visitors?
Summer visitors are birds that arrive on British shores in spring to breed. They spend summer in Britain, rearing their young before returning south in fall.
Why practice birds migrate to Britain in spring and summer?
The most intriguing question about our summertime visitors is not why they go southward, but why they return to Britain yr after year. On the whole, there are two factors that hogtie them to come here. Kickoff, there is plenty of room to hold territory without beingness crowded out past African birds.
And secondly, the long daylight hours allow birds to feed their young for longer every day, helping them to grow apace. And it is this, on a February morning time, that beckons the consume northward. February is the big moving month – soon it will be on the wing.
Where practice summertime visitors migrate to in autumn and wintertime?
About of bird species that go out U.k. in autumn go to Africa, but not all. The Manx shearwater flies beyond the oceans to spend the winter off Argentina, while, famously, the Arctic tern swaps the extreme north for the extreme south, reaching and sometimes circumnavigating Antarctica.
At the other end of the scale, birds such as blackcaps may take the short-haul option and while the wintertime away in Spain, alongside human ex-pats.
Why do birds get out Britain in autumn and winter?
The advantages of going south are obvious, particularly for insectivorous birds. Swallows and nightingales would be taking a large hazard to risk a British winter, when only a few very cold days could be plenty to starve them to death. Further south there is more food all year circular, but there is also much more than competition. Not only are at that place African resident birds, but also migrants from Europe and Asia. A patch of scrubby African wood is quite a melting pot of nationalities betwixt Oct and March.
Wherever they end up, at that place is no doubt that their firsthand surroundings volition expect considerably unlike to the frigid, bare British countryside in winter.
In Espana or North Africa, migrants will forage among olive leaves and evergreen scrub. Willow warblers in tropical Africa feed in the crowns of acacia trees on lush savannah, where only giraffes tin accomplish. Cuckoos will disappear into dense forests, while garden warblers will caput into thick montane scrub with a biodiversity many times college than ours.
Northern wheatears swap moorland for semi-desert landscapes, and nightingales volition sometimes throw off the reticence they prove in the UK and feed in gardens and patches of cultivated land in Africa.
Do birds change their behaviour when they migrate?
Much every bit 'our' birds find themselves in a changed landscape, they do not become fundamentally different. A spotted flycatcher in tropical Africa does what a spotted flycatcher does in U.k.: information technology makes darting sallies to catch insects in flight. Information technology might catch termites and other exotic invertebrates, but its feeding methods are much the same.
Arctic terns dive for fish, turtle doves eat grain on the ground and reed warblers climb up and downwards stems of marshland plants with their potent feet, just as they do every twenty-four hours of their lives in the UK.
If anything, it is our resident birds that change diet the most when our migrants get out these shores; blue tits and many others switch from feeding on caterpillars and other insects to a nutrition of seeds and nuts.
How long does it accept birds to drift?
It'south easy to forget that our migrants don't just wake up one morning under African skies. Most take a month or more to get to their wintering grounds, and they must accommodate to any places they pass on their travels, equally well every bit their destination. They need to overfly the English Channel and the Mediterranean, and then the Sahara Desert. Settling into the African bush must be easy by comparing.
Different types of summer visitors
Osprey
The osprey'south practice of hunting fish by plunging into h2o from a acme is easily translatable from United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland to Westward Africa, where our birds winter. The practice also works equally well in salt water equally in fresh. Five thousand kilometres away, our birds mainly stay on the coast in wintertime, fishing in the shallow, sheltered water just offshore, or forth big rivers. They compete with African fish eagles in some areas.
In Uk, ospreys arrive in March and April to inhabit freshwater lakes, mainly in Scotland. They're as well found at Rutland Water, in the midlands, and in Poole Harbour, Dorset.
Wheatear
The wheatear is mostly a bird of cropped grassland and moorland, commonest by far in northern U.k.. In October information technology departs for Africa, with European birds spreading across from west to e just south of the Sahara. They settle in distinctly barren areas, frequently at altitude, with rocky outcrops, where they proceed a territory and defend it aggressively from other birds. They feed on invertebrates in the same fashion everywhere, perching on a stone or bush-top to survey the scene, then running or flight later their prey.
Chiffchaff
Migrant chiffchaffs leaving these islands tin winter anywhere between Spain and tropical Westward Africa, with the bulk settling effectually Senegal, merely due south of the Sahara. They live in a broad diverseness of scrubby areas, oftentimes in arid regions – rather a different contour from the alpine, lush deciduous woodland that is their typical British breeding habitat. Chiffchaffs utilise the same foraging methods, restlessly searching the leaves for small invertebrates. They leave their wintering grounds in Feb and get in back here in March. The chiffchaff is widespread, convenance in forest throughout U.k..
Yellow wagtail
This buttery-yellow delight is a much-failing bird of meadows, wetlands and arable farmland. 1 of the best means to encounter it is at the feet of horses and cattle, feeding on the flies disturbed past hooves. Translate that to Africa, and you tin can add in zebras and elephants. The yellowish wagtail winters across tropical Africa, only about of our birds are in the west. They feed in much the aforementioned way everywhere, dashing after invertebrates on the ground, or darting into the air. In Great britain, they're establish mainly in central and eastern England, from April to September.
Redstart
In Britain, this delightful robin-like bird is strongly attached to the sessile oak wood of the north and west with their tangles of lichen and moss, dripping with insect life all summer long. Perhaps surprisingly, information technology swaps this lavish habitat with much drier, scrubby habitats in the Sahel of West Africa, fifty-fifty in Mali, much of which is desert. In Africa, it probably spends more time feeding on the footing, like a robin.
Common in much of Britain, y'all can observe redstarts in the New Forest, Central Wales and the Lake District, as well equally much of Scotland.
Consume
The swallow has one of the longest migrations of any bird, with the British population heading for the eastern part of South Africa, where they arrive in Nov as harbingers of spring. They feed there in much the same way, swooping depression to grab juicy flight insects, although they also nab some seeds from Acacia cyclops, hovering at the tips of the branches. They likewise roost in huge numbers in reed beds.
Swift
Swifts arrive in U.k. in late April or early on May, and are a welcome sight and audio in the skies. However, they don't stick effectually here long – staying just long enough to breed before offset their fall migration back to Africa in late July or early Baronial. It'due south believed that their autumn migration is prompted by fewer insects in the air.
Turtle dove
It's quite unusual for a seed-eating bird to be a long-distance migrant, only the turtle dove breaks the rule, leaving in September to fly to the Sahel region, a dry out, scrubby chugalug due south of the Sahara, in countries such as Mali and Senegal. Hither it is much more than barren that in the farmland of Britain, although the turtle pigeon simply feeds on seeds and grains, as information technology does here. Now rare in Britain later on a desperate decline, the turtle dove occurs principally in South East England. Expect for it in summer at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, Martin Downwardly in Hampshire, and much of East Anglia, such as RSPB Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire.
Cuckoo
Tracking of cuckoos in contempo years has revealed much nearly their boggling migration. Many adults leave Britain on their s journeying as early as June. They so fly to West Africa (Nigeria for example), followed by a journey into the deep rainforest of the Congo Basin – a minimum of half-dozen,500km –where they spend about of the wintertime. This is a completely different habitat to the marshes, moors and farmland they inhabit in Britain, and they are hardly ever seen in the rainforest.
The cuckoo returns to Britain in April. Following a large population reject in the south of England, they are now nigh common in northern England and Scotland.
Blackcap
This common warbler is a short-range migrant that winters in southern Spain and Morocco. Simply in recent years, breeders from Germany and Austria take been flying west to spend the winter with united states of america in Britain, and these birds often visit garden feeders.
Atlantic puffin
What puffins did in winter was a mystery until recently. By tagging these tough little members of the auk family with geolocators, scientists have shown that they head far out to sea, braving several months in the stormy Northward Atlantic.
Whitethroat
In the weeks before it migrates, this hedgerow warbler switches from insects to sugary berries to chop-chop put on weight as fuel. Information technology spends the winter in the arid, scrubby region known as the Sahel, to the south of the Sahara.
Chill tern
Nicknamed 'sea swallows', these svelte, long-winged seabirds are true globetrotters. They bandy our northern winter for the permanent daylight of the Antarctic summertime, looping around the Atlantic Ocean to get at that place in an epic journey up to 35,000km long.
Petty tern
The lilliputian tern is one of the Britain's smallest seabirds and weights simply 40-6og. They spend the winter in Africa, and render to the Uk in Apr to nest on our sandy and pebble beaches. Their nests are vulnerable to predation, and to disturbance by humans and dogs. If disturbed, adults will exit the nest, leaving their eggs or chicks exposed to the cold and predators. Trivial tern nesting colonies are also struggling with climatic change, and rising seas and littoral flooding can wash away nests and chicks. Their render migration takes identify in August and September.
Words: Ben Hoare, Dominic Couzens, and Megan Shersby.
Source: https://www.countryfile.com/wildlife/birds/where-do-birds-go-in-winter/
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