Sandy's Garden ... Where Have All The Flyers Gone?

This snippet of whimsical fancy sprang to mind recently when I realised that there were few birds to be seen in or around my garden, a realisation which quickly led to the perception that I did not know the answer to this question.

Where, indeed, had all the birds gone during the recent sustained spell of cold weather?

I know that some birds … swallows and martins, for example, nightingales, cuckoos, swifts, ospreys, terns, puffins and gannets amongst others … leave Scotland for warmer climes during the winter months, returning when spring has, as Bud Neill said, sprung.

So what about the hopeful blackbirds, the sparrows, the wrens, tits and thrushes, not to mention the rooks, the magpies and the other species?

Where have they been?

The answer … unsurprisingly … is that most of them have been nearby, struggling to keep warm.

Again unsurprisingly, wild birds cannot copy many wild animals by building up reserves of body fat to power their metabolisms during hard times.

Plump chickens and turkeys may be what we look for on the poultry shelves of supermarkets – but supersize sparrows, overweight owls and heavy hawks are as common in our gardens as seventeen-stone-sprinters are in athletics stadia.

I cannot name any members of the UK bird population which stock up a larder in the summer.

For most, the necessity when food is scarce is to minimise their energy consumption. This is the principal reason for their disappearance from my garden.

In human terms, there’s no point wasting precious energy on a trip to shops which you don’t expect to have what you are looking for.

And Mother Nature has enabled birds to reduce the energy they need to stay warm by giving them their down covering, the fine feathers which a bird can fluff up to trap air, in exactly the same way in which we can fluff up a quilt or a duvet.

Calm, unmoving air is a super insulating material and birds are experts at exploiting this characteristic.

But the air must be still and essentially dry.

This also helps explain the birds’ disappearance. They do what we do – stay in sheltered locations as much as possible on foul days, venturing out only as absolutely necessary, despite their ability to make their feathers oily by preening to help shake off water, rather as we might don a plastic cape.

Finding shelter is essential; birds share a talent for finding secluded, sheltered roosts with rough sleepers, who abandon their begging positions and ‘vanish’ during severe weather – and, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not envy the homeless their tough lives. Some species congregate to share warmth, as a group of rough sleepers might cluster round a fire.

But any prolonged period of frost exacts a heavy toll; and there will be fewer birds to be seen during the second part of the winter than were visible in our gardens or parks prior to this cold spell.