Nightingales in November by Mike Dilger Read Free Book Online Page B

successfully the previous year. Alternatively, they may attempt to ring the changes following a previous nesting failure. Preparations in the nesting chamber are none too elaborate and amount to little more than the female excavating a shallow scrape that will ultimately hold her clutch, in little more than a month.

    Finally shaking themselves out of their winter torpor, early February will see our Kingfishers turning their attentions for the first time to the busy summer ahead. The minority of Kingfishers which held summer territories in more northerly or upland sites, but spent the winter in more benign lowland or coastal locations, may well now be beginning to return to their breeding grounds. Certainly the majority of males will have been holed up on their breeding territories all winter and so have no need to move, but many females will now have to up sticks in order to track down a mate. Kingfishers are mostly monogamous, but won’t necessarily pair with the same partner from year to year. It does seem, however, that in those cases when a pair does reunite, it tends to be in those locations where their previous joint summer territory had been cleaved into two winter territories.

    While still not quite ready to return to their breeding locations, as the time for departure rapidly approaches, Lapwing flocks will suddenly become far more restless. Bickering between birds can often be seen around this time and sudden erratic flights by birds around the flock can introduce a certain collective skittishness. When birds chaseeach other on the ground, they will do so with their wings raised to show their striking white wing-linings and use their broad black breast-band to both impress and intimidate. These actions are all dress rehearsals for the territorial and courtship behaviour that will soon be used in earnest on their breeding grounds.
    Before departure, from early February onwards, the Lapwings will also undergo a partial moult. Having already completed a full moult between late May and September of the previous year, to insulate them from the worst of the winter, this pre-breeding replacement of feathers on the head, neck and upper breast has an entirely different function – to look good. The change is most marked in the males, as they now develop their characteristic long, wispy crests, boldly marked black and white faces and striking black breast-bands.

    With summer arriving in Arctic Russia and northern Scandinavia much later than at the temperate latitudes of Britain, our two winter visitors are in no immediate hurry to leave our shores for their still frozen breeding grounds. Numbers of Bewick’s Swans are still high in early February, and as winter draws to a close, those populations that have spent most of the winter feeding on arable crops may well be forced over to pastures as their first choice becomes far more depleted. Also faced with the local exhaustion of food supplies, Waxwings at this stage of the winter will have to range far and wide to get their berry fix.
    Where they do manage to locate plentiful supplies of food, the Waxwing’s technique often seems to involve little more than eating large volumes of fruit in one sitting. The record for ‘prodigious Waxwing eating’ must go to a bird seen in Pembrokeshire during the winter of 1949/50. When watched for most of the day observers estimated oneindividual bird to have eaten between 600 and 1,000 fruits of Cotoneaster horizontalis. Unlike many perching birds, Waxwings don’t possess a crop in which to store these huge meals, but do have a section of the oesophagus that extends under the skin of the hind neck, which during intense feeding bursts fills in a similar way to a hamster’s pouches. Suffice to say that the 90g of fruit estimated to have been eaten by this bird still amounted to twice its own body weight!

    Faced with the cold conditions in the North Sea and North Atlantic it’s a fair assumption that our British-breeding Puffins will