Wheatear says spring’s in the air
A flash of white heralds the arrival of spring on a bare field still in the grip of winter drabness.
One swallow may well be too meagre a number to celebrate summer, but the sight of a posturing northern wheatear flaunting its black-and-white tail markings is a sure sign that spring has taken hold.
Such an eye-catching event in the countryside calendar has seen the flamboyant wheatear adorned with arguably more names than any other bird.
Besides coney chuck and furze chat, they were also called clodhoppers or fallow finches as they traditionally turned up on their long migration flights from Africa to rest and feed in fields awaiting the plough.
You would think the name wheatear also has pastoral roots but, in truth, it has far more earthy origins, deriving from a brusque Old English phrase – “white arse”.
Seeing a northern wheatear strutting across open ground then taking flight and showing off its telltale rump markings before March passes has become something of an annual ritual for birdwatchers. Back in the 1970s, wheatears heading for their upland nesting grounds would touch down on our school playing fields in the Home Counties to create unwanted distractions during football matches.
More than once I got ticked off for being side-tracked by the sight of a stunning male in shades of blue, black and ochre with brilliant white accompaniments when I should have been watching the ball.
Subsequent years have seen me seeking the splendid variety of wheatears to be found in Morocco, Spain, Turkey and Israel where, on a good day, it is possible to see up to 10 species, with names as exotic as isabelline, mourning, hooded, desert and white-crowned.
Many of these are sedentary in the arid open country that skirts the Mediterranean, yet those arriving on our shores perform some of the most remarkable flights in the bird world.
Up to 170,000 northern wheatears nest in remote parts of the UK, having wintered in sub-saharan Africa, but many continue their migration to the tundra wastes of Greenland and Canada, making theirs one of the longest migrations of any songbird.
From Africa to Canada, they have one of the longest migrations