Bird Brained

An expression commonly used as a sneering insult. Mistakenly, of course, because despite knowing the answers to everything, we highly intelligent humans are only just beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to what animals instinctively know and can do.

This is a time of year when ornithologists are constantly reminded of this. What prompted me to reflect on it was the sighting in Marden of a Ring Ouzel this past week in October. No, it isn’t an imaginary creature from Winnie the Pooh. It’s also called the Mountain Blackbird because it looks pretty much like our garden visitor and is very closely related to it, being one of the six thrush species native to the UK. It was seen within a few hundred metres of the other five species: blackbird, song thrush and mistle thrush, plus redwing and fieldfare. The latter two species are only here in the winter (they breed across Scandinavia) and the ring ouzel is only here in the summer, spending its winter months in North Africa’s Atlas Mountains. So it’s not often you get to see them all at the same time.

The puzzle is not so much why birds migrate around the globe twice a year: they do it because their summer location provides a better chance of having young that survive and genes are passed on – ie. where there is enough food available and enough daylight for them to catch it and feed it to them.

But how do they know when and how to get there? Length of day tells them when. How, is basically the position of sun and stars in the sky, and the earth’s magnetic field. Simple. Or perhaps not quite so simple, as birds are now thought to use quantum particles, which the Robin, for example, detects  with its right eye (not, note, with its left). I’ll stop here because much of this science is beyond most of the human population’s understanding – certainly mine!

But for the next few months you will certainly see the impact of this when you’re walking around the local farmland and orchards, and even in your garden if you are lucky. The fieldfares and redwings have all managed to fly here from northern Europe – usually at night, using senses that we don’t possess or even understand!

Just enjoy them while you can. Bear in mind though, that if your friendly garden robin is cocking its head to look at you, it may not be in the expectation of food – it might be examining your ‘particles’…

Always remember - although we share the same planet, we live in different worlds.