The only Christmas present you’ll need
WAXWINGS, birds with a tendency for festive over-indulgence, have arrived in Glossop from the far North, and if you love birds, they really are the only Christmas present you need.
I’ve just watched three of these beauties gorging themselves on hawthorn berries within a few hundred metres of Glossop town centre, and have already had reports from readers who haver marvelled at them in their gardens.
These exotic-looking visitors with black bandit masks fly from the forests of north east Europe in winter. In some years large numbers arrive on the east coast in search of their favourite food, red berries. These events are known as ‘irruptions’ and occur in years when there are too many waxwings and not enough berries.
There seems to be a waxwing winter this year with hundreds of the birds being seen across the country. The RSPB is encouraging everyone to make the most of this chance to see one of our most striking feathered visitors.
Waxwings are reddishbrown birds around the size of starlings, and are easily identified by their impressive crests and the sealing-wax red wingtips from which they get their name. They typically descend on rowan trees or hawthorn bushes in supermarket car parks, trilling to one another as they stock up.
Waxwings are not shy, and are generally comfortable around people, so you can usually get amazing views of them as they feed.
When they find a suitable tree or bush they gorge themselves on the fruit. If the berries have become fermented this can cause them to become ‘drunk’. Fortunately waxwings have evolved to be able to cope with this and can recover quickly, apparently without a hangover.
Growing berry bushes and fruit trees in your garden may one day attract waxwings, if you’re very lucky, but they’ll be great for many other birds and animals too.
Find out more about giving nature a home in your garden at www.rspb. org.uk/homes .
For up-to-date information and a fascinating insight to all bird species, including this about waxwings, www.birdguides.com is well worth a visit.
Aberdeen can be regarded as the UK’s capital city of waxwings. Its location in relation to south-west Norway means that if there is any sort of influx from Scandinavia, Aberdeen usually gets some birds. The abundance and variety of berries in the city attracts and holds birds and in the larger invasions flocks of over 1,000 birds have been recorded.
Grampian Ringing Group have been colour-ringing waxwings in and around Aberdeen since 1988. Thanks to many birders/ photographers and members of the public providing resightings and recoveries of dead birds, the results have produced an interesting picture of the birds southwards movements through the UK after landfall in north-east Scotland.
Unfortunately, once the waxwings depart to their remote summer breeding grounds few are ever heard of again. So when small numbers started to arrive in the UK in February 2010, it was an exciting surprise to have a colour-ringed bird return to the same village in which it had been ringed the previous February.
It had been colourringed almost a year to the day in an orchard in Kintore.
This is only the third confirmed record of a waxwing returning to the UK in a subsequent winter from over 4,500 ringed birds.
In contrast is a bird ringed as an adult male in Aberdeen on March 31, 2015, during the very large invasion of winter 2004/05.
It was killed by a cat the following February, on February 15, 2006, in Alyabevskiy, Sovetskiy, Khanty-Mansi, Russian Federation (61º17’N, 62º47’E), a village east of the Ural Mountain range and north of Kazakhstan, 3,714 km north-east of its ringing location the previous winter... and closer to Mongolia than Aberdeen!