COUNTRY VIEWS

We mourn the going of summer migrants but our winter arrivals are just as fascinating

Let’s cheer the autumn bird migration as joyfully as we greet our spring arrivals, says Sara Maitland.

Every year, sometime between 15 March and the end of that month, I hear a sudden haunting bubbling sound somewhere overhead. I am filled not only with joy but also with excitement: the curlews are back. Curlews are short-distance migrants

– they come up from the coast to breed on the moors. They mark for me the beginning of spring.

At much the same time, I will start to see oystercatchers (who, I learned this year, do not eat oysters) and then, gradually, all the other springtime arrivals, some from very far away indeed. Before high summer there will be swallows along the small river below my home, house martins nesting under my eaves and pied flycatchers in the ancient, lovely Wood of Cree (an RSPB reserve). Almost every rural dweller I know is cheered, even excited, by the first arrivals of the spring migrant birds – they seem to offer hope and joy.

I wonder why we don’t feel the same high-hearted enthusiasm and joy for the autumn migrant arrivals? We have lots of them: fieldfares, redwings, bramblings, whooper swans and short-eared owls, to say nothing of lots of ducks, geese and waders. Here in south-west Scotland, along the shores of the Solway Firth for example, 50,000 to 60,000 geese of a number of different species – who have come down from Scandinavia, Russia and the Arctic Circle, where it gets

Lynn Hatzius a great deal colder – find safe wintering places each year. That’s more than one goose for every three people. (The human population of Dumfries and Galloway is about 148,000.) Because the coast of Galloway is south-facing, protected from the Atlantic storms by the top of Ireland and warmed by the Gulf Stream, with a flourishing merse (a Scottish word for saltmarsh, an internationally valuable and relatively rare habitat), it makes a sort of luxury winter home – an avian Florida – for flocks of geese.

Sara Maitland is a writer who lives in Dumfries and Galloway. Her works include A Book of Silence and Gossip from the Forest the most aerodynamic and protected point in the wedge and its place is taken by another goose. This allows the whole flock to travel further and faster. No one, however, seems to know how the geese collectively choose the fresh leader. Given the difficulties Homo sapiens have with this crucial group task, it might be useful to understand better how the geese manage it!

Bird migration is an extraordinary thing. So improbable did it seem to our ancestors that they believed that swallows hibernated, burying themselves through the winter in the mud along river banks. It was not until 1906 that a ringed swallow was reported in Natal, South Africa. Arctic terns weigh about 100g but migrate up to 22,000 miles a year. Bonxies (great skuas) winter off West Africa but return to exactly the nesting site in Scotland that they used the previous year.

So, as winter approaches and the swallows have lined up on the telephone wires and then left for sunnier places, we should watch eagerly to welcome our winter visitors with the same delight and admiration as we greet our summer ones. Both are equally signs of the extraordinary and exciting cycles of the year – and can bring us joy and hope.

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