Author: David Bradley

Many people are well aware that the British Isles welcomes a lot of summer visitors – the cuckoos, swifts, swallows, house martins, and many other migratory species that head north in the spring from their season in the sub-Saharan sun. But, there are also visitors in the winter, birds that head south from the cold to catch a little of the warmth of the Gulf Stream. As far as we know many birds adopted migratory behaviour in response to the Ice Age and having evolved to cope with that are locked into that pattern, at least until climate changes in a significant way once more.

I wrote about a winter visitor that reaches our shores some time ago in this newsletter – the starlings. While we have lots of starlings all year round, those vast flocks we know as murmurations occur when the starling forces are bolstered by visitors. If you head out to the local nature reserves and even just the outskirts of the villages you are likely to see many other visitors among the flocks of gulls and crows, for instance. Among the grey and white clouds of the more well-known gulls, there might be something a little less common, an ivory gull for instance or perhaps even a glaucous gull and we did have a hooded crow on the outskirts of our village, Cottenham, last year.

Among the other winter visitors that turn up in greater numbers are a couple of thrush-type species, related to the blackbird and the song thrush, namely the fieldfare and the redwing. Both species will make a winter home on farmland and use the hedgerows and bordering trees and woodland. Both eat a lot of berries and will attempt to out-compete the resident blackbirds and thrushes for supplies. Should the weather turn foul, as happened when we had the so-called “Beast from the East”.

These birds headed for the relative shelter of our gardens and began stripping firethorn and rowan trees of any remaining berries. Another reason not to be too tidy in pruning back your bushes in the autumn. Incidentally, there were still fieldfares to be seen in the trees that border the allotments and the recreation ground as recently as April, despite most winter visitors having departed for their northern summer homes.

Of course, having some vast wet spaces and in being so close to Norfolk, we have plenty of waterfowl visitors in winter – geese, ducks, swans. These head south from Scandinavia and elsewhere to take advantage of the relative warmth here when the chills really do set in up north. Many readers will no doubt have visited WWT Welney to see the large numbers of Whooper and Bewick’s swans and other waterfowl that arrive each autumn there.

Among the less common birds you might see around the village and in local woodland that turn up for the winter are goldcrests. This species holds joint first place with the firecrest as our smallest bird species, far smaller than the resident wren, which is our most common resident. That said, you can see goldcrests and firecrests at any time of year.

Another relative rarity to watch out for, especially around trading estates and supermarket car parks where there are often lots of berry-laden trees is the waxwing. This elegant and bohemian species spends the summer in the far north, but is peripatetic, rather than migratory, in the winter, and often turns up unannounced in large flocks to those berry-rich sites when food is short in the north. Watch out for huddles of people in olive green and beige with thinly insulated hats hanging around The Beehive Centre or the guided busway parking areas with binoculars and ‘scopes pointing them hopefully at rowan trees and the like and you might just spot an elegant visitor.

Mistle Thrush (Turdus viscivorus) in our mistletoe-infected rowan tree. I was poking the camera out of the bedroom window hoping to catch sight of the Goldcrest (Regulus regulus) calling from our bushes when a male Blackbird and this Mistle Thrush had an altercation and the Thrush ended up perched in the tree right in front of me.

He’s been around for a couple of weeks now, but spends his time hiding in a neighbour’s tree which has lots of berries and lots more female mistletoe (with berries), our rowan has already had all of its offspring predated by birds and the mistletoe growing on our  tree, as you can presumably see, is male, so no berries.

We are assuming it’s the same Mistle Thrush that roosted in their tree last winter; life expectancy is three years, but can be much longer, and, of course, much shorter. They are a resident species and territorial they will scream their cackling call and fend off other thrush-type birds that try to feed on their berries. We hadn’t seen nor heard the bird since last winter, so presumably it was active elsewhere in the area through Spring and Summer and into the Autumn.

Aside from the more raucous call and song that sets it apart from the dulcet tones of the Song Thrush and even the Blackbird, the bold, brown spots on the cream breast of the Mistle Thrush do not have the “heart” or “arrow” shape of those on Song Thrush. The BTO has a nice video describing the distinctions between Song and Mistle.

For those of you intrigued by such things, you might like to know that the scale of the Starling flock murmurating into the reed bed at the Broad Lane balancing pond in Cottenham has increased by an order of magnitude since I last took a look.

On my first visit this year, I estimated 3-4 flocks of 200-300 birds. This evening just as the sunset, there were 3-4 much bigger flocks each of three times those number and several smaller flocks of 100+ thereafter. Estimate the total number of birds roosting there at 2000-3000 at the moment, which is about 1000-1500 fewer than the peak last winter. More will arrive from Europe as winter chills come on I suspect.

At the moment, they’re bedding down in quick succession. If there were raptors around, mainly Peregrine falcons or perhaps owls, they’d murmurate longer before going to roost to avoid being taken on the wing or caught just before hitting their reed bed.

We went looking for Short-eared Owls again at Burwell Fen having heard from a friend that there were “twitchers” huddled together spotting them earlier in the week. We have been to the Fen a few times this year, but not seen the owls since February. However, I learn from local birding expert Hedley Wright that one of last winter’s “flock” (we had more than six there last Winter) had spent its summer on the Fen too presumably having decided not to return to Scandinavia for the breeding season for some reason.

Anyway, we saw a Kingfisher dart back and forth along the almost dry ditch in the middle of the Fen and then Mrs Sciencebase was first to spot one in the distance close to the electric power installation on the edge of Burwell. And, then a second. There were several bird photographers around, but I wouldn’t describe any of them as “twitchers” and maybe not even “birders” as such, there is a distinction (see my birding glossary).

There have been sightings of more than one SEO since the end of October 2019, and yesterday (10th November), it seemed that there were perhaps three or maybe four. We never saw two at a time, but were aware of two in the air while another was out of sight in the scrub a few hundred metres in front of us.

Two of the owls were forced aloft by Rooks at different times. Rooks really don’t like raptors and owls in their territory and will harangue, harry, and harass them endlessly to get them to move on. One of the SEOs has a very apparent feather injury to one wing.