In the birding world, July marks the start of autumn passage and the massed southward migration of countless millions of birds.
There’s usually a brief pause in late June when the very last north-bound migrants have passed through and, for a few days, perhaps a week, there are no migration movements, and then the tide turns with the first returning birds, often waders from the high Arctic, heading back south.
Zsuzsanna Bird
For the next few months wading birds can turn up almost anywhere, including unconsidered small field pools or landscaped lakes in parks. Some will be familiar county birds such as Curlews, others may be more scarce passage migrants such as Wood Sandpipers or Black-tailed Godwits, having a rest and a feed before continuing on a journey of a thousand miles or more.
The first of our resident birds to depart will be the adult Cuckoos that only started to arrive in mid-April. They start to leave in late June and by mid-July, just twelve weeks after the first arrivals caused joy to anyone who heard them, most of the adult population will be many miles south of the UK.
Jon Hawkins - Jon Hawkins - Surrey Hills Photography
By mid-August and on into October migration becomes much more obvious because of the massed flocks of birds on the move, but July is a month of more subtle changes and discreet disappearances, as the focus of birds’ lives moves from reproduction to replacement with the start of the annual moult.
Many birds will replace all of their body and flight feathers over the next few weeks, which makes them more vulnerable to predation as well as requiring lots of energy.
This need to feed up and stay hidden is partly what drives the almost complete pause in bird song in late July and August, leaving only the calls and chatter of flocks of juvenile finches and tits.
Robins sing throughout the year to help them mark out and defend their territories, with the exception of the high summer pause when having an orange breast and missing perhaps a third of their flight feathers drives them to be less obvious to potential predators. When they start singing again, in late August and early September, it’s with the more poignant to human ears winter song, a sure sign of impending autumn.
The moult is even more dramatic for wildfowl as our ducks and geese don’t replace their flight feathers sequentially as most birds do, but simply drop all of them, becoming flightless for a few weeks. This makes them vulnerable, so they respond by moving to safer areas, typically larger water bodies, and the bright plumage of the males is replaced by a more cryptic eclipse plumage similar to that of the females, often causing people to think that all of the males have disappeared.
Some wildfowl really do disappear, and undertake moult migrations out of the county. Observations of colour-ringed birds shows that many of our Canada and Greylag Geese move to lakes in Cumbria to join large moulting assemblies there. Shelduck will move either to the Wadden Sea on the coast of Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, or possibly to a new suspected moulting area on the Dee Estuary between North Wales and the Wirral Peninsula. For male Goosanders the move is even more striking, as the population moves to a favoured fjord in north-east Norway, leaving the females behind and not returning until October.
WildNet - Gillian Day
Feather maintenance can also cause birds to engage in other unusual behaviours such as sunbathing, which usually involves the bird adopting a strange posture as it tries to spread out and expose large areas of feathers to the heat of the sun to soften preen oil and possibly make it easier to find and remove parasites such as fleas and feather mites.
Sunbathing birds often look to have crumpled and may lay flat on a sunny rooftop with wings and tails spread out, or they may be in a sheltered corner and leaning one side towards the sun.
A related behaviour, most commonly seen in birds of the crow family, is anting, where the bird lies down on an ant nest and exposes feathers to jets of formic acid from the ants, again to deter or drive our feather mites. Sometimes beak-fulls of ants will be held in hard-to-reach spots such as the underwings.
These behaviours can be seen anywhere, including outside your window, and repay the habit of bird watching rather than simply identifying to species and moving on.
Birds are among our most colourful and fascinating animals and, unlike many other groups, can often be enjoyed as we go about our daily business without any great effort beyond that of noticing them. Even feral or town pigeons can show some fascinating behaviours if you watch them for a few minutes.
(c) Gillian Day
One of my favourite pieces of behaviour is watching the aerobatic displays of Jackdaws and Ravens as they play in updraughts on the edge of hills.
Any exposed hillside will do, but my personal favourite spot is the summit of Earl’s Hill, at Shropshire Wildlife Trust’s Earl’s and Pontesford Hill Nature Reserve near Pontesbury.
I can stop off there on my way home from work and, if I’m lucky, have several Ravens or perhaps three or four dozen Jackdaws stooping and rolling around me as I take in the fabulous views from the trig point. On the way back I usually walk through the old meadows and their ant hills that are such a draw for Green Woodpeckers, easily the best site I know for the species.
I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much can be seen in a reasonably short, but strenuous, walk that starts just a few hundred metres from a busy A-road, and always offer silent thanks to the Trust as I return to the car for making such a wonderful, enriching site freely available to people like me.
