Springwatch British Wildlife: Accompanies the BBC 2 TV series. Stephen Moss
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– unlike other garden birds, they defend a territory outside the breeding season as well.
Robins are known for nesting in some very unusual places. As well as in shrubberies and climbing plants, they will also take to open-fronted nest boxes, teapots, toilet cisterns, overcoat pockets and even the top of tractor engines!
The robin is not only Britain’s favourite bird; it also has a global legacy. All over the world – especially in places once ruled by the British such as North America, Asia and Africa – all sorts of birds with a reddish or orange breast are given the name ‘robin’, despite having little or no connection with our familiar bird.
©John Hawkins/FLPA
Close-up, the starling is one of our most handsome garden birds.
Is there any bird with a more contradictory public image than the starling? Hated and vilified for its supposed ‘bullying’ of other smaller birds on our bird tables, the very same species is celebrated for its extraordinary evening flights during winter, when millions of birds gather together in aerobatic displays before going to roost for the night.
We may try to separate these two images in our mind, but they are just two very different aspects of the lives of this much-maligned yet fascinating bird. Even if you don’t like their behaviour as they squabble around your bird table, just take a moment to have a closer look.
The starling may appear black but its plumage is in fact a subtle mixture of glossy blacks, mauves, greens and browns, which in autumn and winter is heavily spotted with white. In spring and summer, the spots mainly disappear to reveal a truly stunning glossy plumage, set off by that bright yellow, dagger-shaped bill.
In late summer, people are often puzzled when they see birds that, although the size and shape of a starling, are a dull brown in colour. These are juvenile birds, which have recently left the safety of the nest and are hanging around with their parents. They always look rather embarrassed at their drab plumage – as well they might.
Although starlings may have some pretty antisocial habits, they are also fascinating to watch as they jostle for position on a bird table, often uttering little calls as if scolding their companions. In some ways they are a bit like us: sociable, noisy and a bit messy. Perhaps that’s why we view them with a degree of suspicion!
Until quite recently, winter roosts of starlings could be found across much of lowland Britain, sometimes in the middle of the countryside but more often in the heart of city centres, where the extra warmth would attract huge flocks on winter evenings. There were famous roosts in the centre of Glasgow, on Bristol Temple Meads station and in London’s Leicester Square. But during the past two or three decades, numbers have fallen dramatically, and now very few roosts remain – and none in our cities. The best known of today’s roosts, on the Somerset Levels, once attracted as many as seven million starlings. Today, numbers are down to one or two million, but this is still enough to create spectacular aerial displays.
It is often asked how on earth birds in these gatherings avoid crashing into one another as they fly so close and so fast. The simple answer is that they look out for movements of the birds around them, and when one bird shifts position – perhaps in response to a bird of prey such as a sparrowhawk or peregrine – each adjacent bird will follow suit. This creates the most extraordinary twists and turns of the whole flock, as if it were a single organism. Only when a few birds decide to go to roost for the night in the reeds below will the rest follow suit, plummeting towards the ground like water running down a plughole.
There are two possible reasons for the decline in numbers at these winter roosts. One is that the British population has been dropping, as with so many of our countryside birds, due to modern farming methods. Another is that milder winters across continental Europe have meant that many birds stay put instead of crossing the North Sea to Britain.
Starlings have another hidden talent: the ability to mimic not just other birds, but mechanical devices too. So if you hear what sounds like a car alarm or a mobile phone, but can’t work out why the noise is coming from a rooftop, the chances are it is being made by a starling!
©Dickie Duckett/FLPA
The spectacular gatherings of millions of starlings on winter evenings have become a tourist attraction in parts of Britain.
©Duncan Usher/Minden Pictures/FLPA
House martins and swallows regularly gather on telegraph wires in early autumn as they prepare to migrate south to Africa.
These four summer visitors from Africa are among our most familiar breeding birds, even though they spend less than half the year with us. As they return each spring to nest in our cities, towns and villages, it is hard to believe that these tiny creatures – each of them weighing barely 30 grams (an ounce) – have travelled all the way from Africa, a distance of up to 10,000 km (6,000 miles).
Like all migrants, these birds make these journeys across the globe to take advantage of the abundant food supply available in the long days of the northern summer – in their case, billions of flying insects, which they catch on the wing to feed themselves and their hungry broods of young.
We might justifiably wonder why they don’t stay put in Africa all year round, but if they did so, they would have to compete with the numerous resident species of that vast continent. By heading north, they have a greater chance of surviving and raising a family than if they stayed where they were, despite the many hazards of such a long and arduous journey
The first of the quartet to return to our shores is generally the sand martin, which usually arrives sometime in the second half of March, though early birds do occasionally get here in February. Being birds of watery habitats, they usually head straight for lakes and reservoirs, where they can feed and replenish their lost energy on the few flying insects that are beginning to emerge.
Swallows and house martins return in early April: swallows mainly to farmyards, and house martins to villages, towns and suburbs, where they build their cup-shaped nests under the eaves of our homes. Swifts – which although superficially similar are quite unrelated to swallows and martins – are the last to arrive, generally returning to our towns and cities in the last week of April and the first week of May. They are also the first to leave, mostly gone by mid-August, while the others stay until September or even October.
Telling these four species apart is easier than you might think, provided you get good views. Swifts are the most distinctive, being completely sooty-black, and with narrow, scythe-shaped wings and a shortish, pointed tail. Swallows are the most graceful of the quartet, with long, swept-back wings and a long, forked tail; they are dark blue above and pale below, with a brick-red throat. The two species of martin are compact little birds with short, forked tails and triangular-shaped wings. Sand martins are brown above and white below, with a brown band across the chest, while house martins are dark blue above and white below, with a very distinctive white rump.
Although these are among our most familiar summer visitors, our knowledge of them when they leave our shores and head south to Africa varies considerably. Swallows gather in huge roosts – sometimes over a million birds strong – in reed beds throughout sub-Saharan Africa. But the other three species tend to be solitary in habit, making them far harder to find in this vast continent. Over the past century or so, more than 320,000 house martins have been ringed in Britain, yet in all that time just one has been found in Africa. Soon, however, the ability to track birds by using tiny GPS devices will hopefully reveal where this familiar little bird spends the half-year when it is away from us.