Table of Contents 1.

We all know that birds prepare for winter in different ways. Some migrate – many warblers and hirundines like Swallows disappear back to Africa to avoid a British winter altogether, while winter thrushes like Fieldfares, along with wildfowl like Whooper Swans and Barnacle Geese, arrive on our shores from further north.

But why? Of course, some of it is to do with weather conditions. Take the tiny Goldcrest, for example. The smallest British songbird, equalled only in its diminutive size by the Wren, arrives in millions from Scandinavia each autumn after extraordinary solo flights across the North Sea. They can often be found exhausted on East Coast beaches as they regain their strength after the monumental effort. The herculean task is worth it though, because 70-90% of those which risk remaining in Scandinavia for the winter don’t make it between November and March. Their tiny body size, weighing the same as a 20p coin, means that they are especially susceptible to the cold and need an almost constant supply of food to keep active and maintain their body temperature. So staggering is their migration that it was once believed that they couldn’t do it alone, and they earned the nickname “Woodcock Pilot” in coastal communities, who thought instead that they rode on the backs of Woodcocks!

The weather can even affect larger birds like the Swans and Geese, making flight and navigation more difficult. But the weather itself is less of a problem for them; rather the fact that they are grazers or dabblers, meaning that they eat fresh vegetation on land, or on or just under the water’s surface. When the weather is too cold, or there’s snow, their food sources simply aren’t accessible. The surface of the water freezes over, and snow covers and quickly withers any fresh vegetation underneath.

Other birds like the winter Thrushes have less of a problem accessing their food in snowy conditions. For them, food is more of an issue. If the winter is hard, they need more calories to survive it, and their food source, berries, is often in demand by other creatures too. The crop may not have been as heavy, or it may already have been eaten if the weather changed earlier than expected.

Yet other species which don’t migrate deal with the food situation differently. Jays are well known for caching acorns, but they aren’t the only species to hide their food in readiness for the winter. Coal Tits will also cache food. If you have Coal Tits visiting your feeders at this time of year, you might be able to watch this as they take a seed and fly off to hide it in the crevice of some tree bark, bury it under moss or push it into the soil, only to return moments later for another. They can hide thousands of seeds and nuts this way and, unlike Jays, which remember their cache locations more precisely, rely on the sheer number of locations to be able to find hidden food in a general area by chance when bad weather does hit and they need to relocate them.

These are just a few of the ways that birds prepare for winter, yet others feed up extensively to ensure they can survive losing a little weight when they need to weather a literal storm, while some find communal roosts to help stay warm or connected. Whatever the strategy, there’s often more to it than meets the eye, and sometimes a folk story to go with it.