Migration and Commuting

It's not just the southwards migration of birds that captures the attention at this time. The daily corvine commute to the west is another feature that can become spectacular on certain mornings but is always interesting. It's common to count over a hundred at a time in a long uneven trail, groupings ever changing, shortly to be followed by another large contingent until it's hard to decide where one commuter train ends and the next one begins.

After a while the traffic tails off into threes and fours and the odd individual. Not everyone remembered to set their alarm clock. It has always seemed that the dominant bird here is the jackdaw with occasional rooks. Unlike geese there's no commonly agreed formation, so on no two days and with no two groups do you see the same pattern in the sky.

At the same time we are still seeing numbers of smaller birds heading south, and the northern thrushes are now here but not yet in the numbers seen last year.