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Archive for December, 2011

Ray Colliers Country Diary – Migrant birds

Monday, December 19th, 2011

During the last few weeks there have been  many signs that migrant birds have been coming into the Highlands.  These are either birds passing through or some that have come to stay for the winter months.  Some are  more obvious than others such as geese as  the  last week has seen skeins of geese flying  over, mainly heading south, with some passing directly over Inverness.    Walking through a car park in Inverness for example I heard and then saw  large flocks of pink-footed geese flying over at some height and heading south.  These geese  would have come from  Greenland or Iceland from their breeding grounds.  Whilst some will stay for the winter in the Moray Firth area many will go further south although mainly along the east coast of Scotland.   The birds from Greenland will have achieved their summer moult and then they  move to Iceland for a short period  before continuing their journey to Scotland.   Geese are long lived birds by any standard and the pink-footed goose has been known to live for over 38 years

Other much smaller migrants have not gone un-noticed and these include the very large numbers of fieldfares and redwings, both members of the thrush family, that have invaded our shores.  Normally both these birds will stay in the Highlands  for some weeks gorging themselves mainly on the rowan berries although they will  take many others such as hawthorn and even windfall apples.  However the berry crop has been a disaster in the Highlands this year and most of the birds have moved on.  Interestingly the redwings will have come from breeding grounds in Iceland where most of them nest on the ground.  The fieldfares, in contrast,  will have come from  Scandinavia.    Redwings also breed in Scandinavia but ringing  has shown that for some reason these birds tend to move to southern Britain and farther south in Europe.

There is another member of the thrush family that we tend to take for granted and this is the blackbird.  Blackbirds that breed in the Highlands tend to stay there all the year round although there is movement in the Autumn and Spring to and from the higher ground to lower ground.  Blackbirds that breed on the continent  tend to move to the UK for the winter and many arrive along the Scottish coast from the north and east.  Many of us will have seen this influx in our gardens in the last few weeks.   I recall that one morning  a few weeks ago there was a sudden influx of blackbirds into the garden.  One immature bird I photographed was feeding on an apple I had stuck it a tree They had just appeared overnight and I counted 14 in just one small area of the garden.    What was significant was that the majority of them were males but instead of the usual yellow beak they were all black.   This is typical of the birds from Europe especially from Finland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.   The orange yellow beak  and ring round the eye will not be attained by these birds until they return to their breeding grounds to the east and north east.

Some blackbirds can develop partly white plumage especially as they get older.  One extreme of this is the totally white albino bird and if it is a true albino it will often have pink eyes.  At the other extreme are blackbirds that  have a few white feathers which tend to spread as  they get older.