View From The Shed by Shaun Finnie - I NEED A HOLIDAY

I NEED A HOLIDAY

Have you been lucky enough to enjoy a Summer holiday this year? Two weeks abroad in the sun, maybe or perhaps enjoying travelling around our own beautiful island? My turn is yet to come. I'm sure I'll report about it in a later blog, though. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm not shy when it comes to talking about my travels.

I, and many others, often say, “I need a holiday”, but do we really? Don't we just 'really want' one? We actually 'need' very few things. Air, water, food and somewhere safe to call home just about covers our real basic 'needs'. A long weekend in Magaluf (replace with your own equivalent) is a nice-to-have but in truth it's just a break from the humdrum of everyday life. It's nothing more than an emotional reset.

A bird's real needs are not much different to ours. Air, sustenance, safety. Throw in the desire to mate and pass on their genes and you have a happy bird. They're really no more complex than that. So while for us a trip to another country is a jolly jape and, in most cases, nothing more than a recharging of our batteries, for them it really is an absolute necessity, a matter of life or death.

Imagine if the food where you live becomes scarce. You would have to go to somewhere else to fill your belly. Or what if the temperature in your home becomes too hot or cold for you to survive? You'd have to find a more tolerable home for the rest of the year. These two reasons created the basic need to migrate. Around 4,000 bird species have been doing it for thousands of generations. Over time they've found the best places to go in the Summer and Winter seasons that meets all of their basic needs. And they're still fine-tuning their migration routes and destinations, which is why (for example) we are seeing more and more Spoonbills in the North of England each year. The Iberian Peninsula is becoming too hot and dry for them to use as a reliable Summer feeding ground so some of them have given it up as a bad job and have found Yorkshire a nice alternative, thank you very much. And why shouldn't they? It's cooler than Portugal and has great feeding opportunities. It's not much further to get back to Africa for the Winter each year and best of all, it's Yorkshire! When you see the Spoonbills at Old Moor and Fairburn Ings reserves you're really seeing migratory evolution in action. How fabulous is that?

Migration is an absolute necessity for many birds. Let's take the tiny Goldcrest for example. This is one of the UK's smallest birds, weighing less than a 20p piece. Over half a million of them live here all year round but in Autumn their numbers are swelled by the arrival of migratory flocks from Scandinavia. They wouldn't survive the harsh Scandi winters so brave the treacherous North Sea winds to overwinter here with us. That could mean a journey of over a thousand miles but it's one that they simply have to take; they'd freeze to death if they stayed where they were. Then, when our English Spring season comes around, they feel the urge to fly all the way back. All this on wings that are only five or six centimetres in length. And the journey is of course exhausting. It's a delicate balancing act (isn't everything in nature) between storing up enough fat reserves to provide enough energy to make the flight but not too much as more weight requires more energy to fly. It's survival of the fittest. Well said, Mr Darwin.

All this is even more staggering when you learn that the average lifespan of a Goldcrest is just about the shortest of any bird; very few will make it to their fourth birthday. The majority don't even make it to one. For those who do, their entire life is focussed on surviving long enough to breed in their second year, and if that means having to fly a thousand miles twice a year then so be it. The gene pool must be maintained at all costs.

Of course Goldcrests are just one example and their migration flight isn't a long one at all compared to some. The record holder (not that it means anything to them) is the Arctic Tern – which could just as easily be named the Antarctic Tern. Each year some birds of this species will leave their breeding grounds located well within the Arctic Circle once it turns a bit nippy (it's all relative). They follow the sun, seeing more sunlight over a year than any other creature on the planet, until they end up spending Southern Hemisphere Summer on the edge of the Antarctic pack ice. Even if they flew a direct route this would be a minimum of 12,000 miles but they don't make it easy for themselves. Or do they? Yes, they choose to travel a much longer distance but these routes usually follow the prevailing winds so are more energy efficient, even if travelling them lengthens the flight up to around 25,000 miles in some cases. As these graceful little birds usually live for around thirty years, that means that they will, over a lifetime, fly the distance from the Earth to the Moon and back... three times!

You can imagine the conversation of any migrating bird with his new fledgeling...
“Dad, why are we eating so much so quickly?”
“So that we'll be fit and ready to fly to another continent when the time comes, Son.”
“And what will we do when we get there, Dad?”
“Well, we'll eat as much as we can as quickly as we can so that we're fit and healthy enough to fly back here.”
“And what will we do when we get back here, Dad?”
“Well I don't know about you, but me and your Mum have something special planned....”

And that's the entire life plan of a migratory bird. Eat. Travel. Breed. Repeat if possible. So next time you see a seasonal bird – say a Swallow heralding the arrival of Summer, or one of the Winter Thrushes in the colder seasons – take a moment to think of where it's come from and the journey it's had to endure. It certainly won't have been a holiday.