In Autumn There Is A Large Annual Migration Of Birds In And Out Of Britain. Summer Breeding Birds Such As Swifts And Nightjars Are The First To Leave In August And Swallows Are The Last In Early October. Nearly All Spend The Winter In Sub Saharan Africa.
These are replaced by winter migrants escaping the cold of the arctic and Eastern Europe. The mild, winter conditions on our estuaries and salt and freshwater marshes make these habitats of world importance as the wintering grounds for vast numbers of wildfowl and waders. Two thirds of the world population of barnacle geese overwinter in Britain and only 200 pairs of wigeon breed here but 450,000 are found in winter. The large roosting displays of starlings, called mumurations, contain mostly birds from Eastern Europe.
There are also birds arriving that are not making a permanent landing here but stop-over on their first stage to Africa. They are known as passage migrants. The curlew sandpiper is a small wading bird that breeds in the arctic tundra and migrates through Britain on its way to West Africa. Single birds turn up in small overall numbers in a normal year but in 2025 there has been an increase, possibly due to a good breeding year. Five stayed for several weeks at Seaton Wetlands. Ospreys breeding in Scotland and Northern England will make a stop on the south coast to re-fuel.
Up to 20 individuals can pass through Seaton Wetlands and one has been seen at the new wetland reserve at Budleigh Salterton.
Migrating birds are also at the mercy of storms and can be blown off course. The wryneck no longer breeds in Britain but one spent a few weeks this autumn in the garden of the Double Locks Inn in Exeter and another was seen at Seaton. Birds travel from the Northern USA to the Southern USA but can be so disorientated that they are blown across the Atlantic. These sudden appearances are a delight for the travelling bird spotter known as the twitcher.
Other unexpected movements have occurred in the past by birds that do not regularly migrate. There have been influxes from Europe of jays because of the failure of the acorn crop and hawfinches because of the failure of Hornbeam seed.
Up to the early 1800s in the absence of scientific thought and experiment, the loss and arrival of bird species in autumn was a mystery shrouded in myth and legend. The views of people then would now be thought of as something from a fantasy film or a story book for children. Cuckoos were thought to turn in to sparrow hawks as their plumage and flight are similar. Woodcock are nocturnal birds that when seen silhouetted against the moonlight sky, were thought to have travelled from the moon. Swallows regularly roost in reed beds before leaving for migration, and were thought to spend the winter in the mud of lakes. The two most famous biologist of the late1700s, Carl Linnaeus, who gave us our system of naming species and Gilbert White who pioneered natural history observation, could not accept that swallows travelled 6,000 miles on migration. Linnaeus believed they survived in mud and White that they hibernated deep in caves. Perhaps the most bizarre belief dating from the Middle Ages was that barnacle geese arrived in winter having hatched from marine barnacles.
A defining moment to prove migration occurred was in May 1822 when a white stork arrived in Germany to breed. It was shot on arrival with a two and a half foot long spear stuck through its neck. A type of spear only known from equatorial Africa. It can be seen on display at the University of Rostock.
Bird ringing studies have provided a lot of information on migration but depend on the recapture of birds elsewhere. We assume that house martins overwinter in Africa but still do not know exactly where. Satellite tagging of individuals is now giving us more information. Adult cuckoos have been shown to leave in June, rather than July as previously thought, spending only two months here. Also, while all travel to the rainforests of tropical Africa, the northern British population travel east through Europe, while our southern population travels west through Spain, and the latter has a higher mortality rate. With spending less than two months in the UK, it is really more of an African species than a British one.
Migration itself is not without its problems as the long journeys can take their toll. Less than half of the swallows born in England make it to Africa and back again to breed. The slender billed curlew, a breeding bird of Eastern Europe had also to overcome breeding losses because of changes in agriculture, and then shooting at its wintering sites in Italy. These had contributed to its decline and it was officially declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature on the 10th October 2025. The first ever recorded global bird extinction from Europe.
Mick Street
The following murmuration video is taken from YouTube and shows starlings at Aberyswyth pier.
Image Attribution: PierreSelim, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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