Birds face a struggle to survive the rigours of a British winter. The darker days mean there is less daylight in which to find food, and frost and snow (and last winter, floods) can make vital feeding areas inaccessible. Our native species will spend the autumn building up their fat reserves to help cope, while many other birds, as I mentioned last month, will have headed south. But winters further north and east are much harder than ours, so many birds are also arriving at this time of the year.
Many water birds spend their winter here, including huge numbers of geese and arctic swans, mostly heading for coastal mudflats and marshlands. The wild geese we’re likely to see overhead are not migrating - they are the Canada geese that are here all year round, though in their native North America they do migrate. But numbers of winter ducks may be found in suitable places like Llyn Coed y Dinas, with the wigeon, with its distinctive whistling call, a particular favourite of mine. I’ll write more about ducks and other water birds next time.
Many winter garden birds are extras to our resident species: blackbirds and song thrushes, robins and starlings in our gardens are all augmented by visitors from abroad, from Scandinavia and as far east as Siberia. With them come birds that are special to winter, like the two winter thrushes: redwings, slightly smaller than a song thrush and with an orange flash on its flanks, and the larger fieldfare, elegant in grey and brown, and often in large noisy flocks. Redwings will come to gardens, taking yew berries but happy also to sample chopped up apples - why not leave a few on your lawn? Fieldfares are more typical of open fields, especially where a field has been newly manured, with plenty of worms and insects to find.
A colourful and unusual visitor is the waxwing, more likely to be found on the eastern side of the country, but occurring anywhere in harder weather. They love berries, and can often be found in such places as supermarket car parks, where berry-bearing bushes have often been planted. Finches flock together in the winter, the flock giving a better chance to find food and some protection for each individual bird from predators. Winter visitors like bramblings will join our native finches; this is a finch closely related to the chaffinch, but more robust-looking and with a distinctive white rump visible as it flies. Siskins and redpolls move down from wilder areas into our gardens, where they often flock with goldfinches. The male siskin, about the size of a blue tit, is an attractive bird in yellow and green with a black cap.
One summer warbler, the blackcap, has started to be seen in Britain through the winter, visiting bird tables. These may well not be the birds that were here in the summer, but continental birds coming in. The male is easy to identify with its black cap, while the female has a brown cap. Our smallest British bird, the goldcrest, will also move into gardens in winter, from the conifer plantations that are its preferred habitat, to join tits in feeding from suet balls. Its close relative the firecrest is a winter visitor, but not I think to be found this far north.
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