Behind the image
There are flocks of birds and then there are proper flocks of birds. When finches join forces, no beech forest is safe.
When finches join forces
We all love to see a brambling or two on the bird table. But while for Britons a small flock of these attractive winter visitors is a morethan-satisfying sighting, it’s peanuts compared to the gatherings that can be encountered elsewhere in Europe.
Bramblings breed in birch and conifer forests across northern Scandinavia and Asia. As the mating season draws to a close, the birds switch their feeding efforts from insects to tree seeds (notably beechmast), dispersing out of their breeding range in search of crops.
While the Asian birds migrate to countries such as Pakistan, India and Japan, the Scandinavian contingent heads to the beech forests of southern Sweden. But if the mast yield is poor or heavy snow smothers the feast, the bramblings will travel even farther south, making landfall in Germany, Switzerland, Austria or Slovenia, zoning into areas where their fellow finches have already located food. Overnight, small, otherwise inconspicuous areas become smothered in hundreds of thousands of hungry birds, which crowd the branches like dusky fruits.
Finch fantastic
Lázsló took this image in a small valley in Lödersdorf, Austria. “The first birds arrived just before sunset, in small, noisy groups, then the flocks grew in size until there was an enormous, million-strong cloud swirling above,” he recalls. “Predators attacked from every direction. It was a thrilling spectacle.”
This was not the first brambling bonanza that Lázsló had witnessed; nor would it be his last. He was there at Slovenia’s 2005 mega-flock of two million birds; and at the once-in-a-decade event that occurred in the country earlier this year, in which an eye-popping five million finches stopped by for supper.
The flocks grew until there was an enormous cloud swirling above, then predators attacked from every direction.