Mixed flocks of Fieldfare and Redwing are currently feeding on the Reserve.
While summer brings the colour, song and drama of the breeding season, winter is a great time to watch birds flocking together, sometimes in spectacular numbers. If you walk around a woodland in the winter you may be forgiven for wondering where all the birds have gone. In fact, there are likely to be plenty of birds about, but instead of being evenly spread throughout the area, several species group together and move through the woodland in a loose, mixed feeding flock. You may be lucky, and suddenly find yourself surrounded by blue, great and coal tits, goldcrests and chaffinches, twittering and feeding hungrily in one small area. Enjoy it while you can - in moments they will have moved on.
By using your senses, especially by listening, you can improve your odds of encountering these feeding flocks. The birds keep in touch with one another using short, quiet 'contact' calls, which, roughly translated, mean 'I'm here - where are you?' By sticking together, they improve their chance of survival, because together they are far more likely to spot a predator, like a sparrowhawk, before it's too late.
Avoiding becoming someone else's dinner becomes even more challenging at night. Visit the countryside or city centre on a winter's evening and you are likely to come across a massive flock of starlings, wheeling and turning in the darkening sky, heading for a sheltered spot —an empty building, leafless tree, or a bed of swaying, yellow reeds. It is fascinating to watch these huge gyrating bubbles of birds, spinning in the sky, like fish shoaling together to dazzle their predators. When the birds decide it is safe to, they shoot down in a dark tornado of whirring wings.
Other species can be seen moving to their night-time roosts—you may have noticed the steady evening migrations of gulls, commuting from their daytime feast on a rubbish tip to a reservoir or lagoon, where they will spend the night on the water, alongside ducks and geese. Rooks and jackdaws gather in their hundreds in farmland woods. Pied wagtails sometimes roost in their thousands in the warmth of power station cooling towers.
For an individual bird, getting the timing right can determine whether you live or die. If you leave your feeding ground too early, you may struggle to find enough food, but if you leave it too late and miss the flock, you risk being picked off alone by a bird of prey. It is the failing light that triggers many birds to head to their night roosts. In poor weather, starlings may be seen heading off to bed far earlier than normal. The opposite can also be true, and on bright, moonlit nights geese may still be seen feeding, out on the frost-silvered fields.
Dave Blackledge Warden Cumbria Coast Reserves RSPB Campfield Marsh North Plain Farm, Bowness on Solway, Wigton, Cumbria, CA7 5AG
rspb.org.uk
For more information about Campfield Marsh Reserve and the regularly updated blog, or 200 others throughout the UK visit www.rspb.org.uk/campfieldmarsh
The RSPB is the country’s largest nature conservation charity, inspiring everyone to give nature a home. Together with our partners, we protect threatened birds and wildlife so our towns, coast and countryside will teem with life once again. We play a leading role in BirdLife International, a worldwide partnership of nature conservation organisations.