One of the first birds to arrive here from Africa in spring is the wheatear. Many are seen as early as March. At that time the males are very attractive silvery-blue birds with black wings and a black comma through the eye. They are heading for the moors to nest in the stone walls and rabbit holes. Now they are on their way back again, looking a bit duller and more buffish, but as brisk and bouncy in their movements as ever.
They appear on fences or banks in fields along the coast, bobbing up and down and constantly flicking their wings and tails. Then they swoop down into the field to pursue insects in the grass. They prefer to forage on smooth grass, where they dart about swiftly or flutter up to take a fly on the wing. They may sit on a mound or stone and pounce on insects that they see moving down below.
They are easily recognised when they fly, because they have a white tail with a black T-shape at the end of it — a bar right across the tip and a line running up through the middle. The briefest glimpse of this identifies them.
Although they start their autumn journey at about the time the wheat — at any rate in drier years than this — is being cut, their name has no connection with it. It refers to that white upper tail, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon words for “white” and “arse”.
Later in the autumn we shall see some Greenland wheatears. These are a different race, larger than the others and more uniformly buff in colour. These are much-travelled birds. Some of them may come, via Greenland, from Canada. The birds of both races disappear, heading for Morocco and Algeria, at night, and will end their journey south of the Sahara desert.
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Yellow wagtails, which also spend the winter in sub-Saharan Africa, are gathering in the same coastal fields. Last week I saw about a dozen feeding round the feet of some cows, in the same place as I saw some feeding around sheep last year. They don’t mind about the animal — all they care is that its feet shall disturb insects in the grass as it plods along.
These wagtails were feeding in quite long grass, and would have been invisible had they not fluttered up constantly as the cows moved. Little yellow streaks kept shooting into the air and diving back into the grass again.
The wagtails were kept company by swallows, of which there were many flying to and fro, some of them benefiting from the cows’ activities, others concentrating on a lower field with shorter, damper grass, which must have had many flying insects rising from it. The swallows were great individualists, flying in all directions, and often coming from opposite ends of the field. Some nearly collided head-on — but they never actually did.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
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Birders Yellowish juvenile willow warblers and chiffchaffs.
Twitchers Fea’s petrel, Bridges of Ross, Co Clare; laughing gull, Hayle Estuary, Cornwall; thrush nightingale, Sumburgh, Shetland; citrine wagtail, Land’s End, Cornwall; red-necked phalarope, Blithfield Reservoir, Staffordshire.
Details from Birdline, 09068 700222 (60p a min) www.birdingworld.co.uk; www.rspb.org.uk
derwent.may@thetimes.co.uk