Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes February 25 2009

The mistle thrush, a larger bird shown here, also suffers frosts since they rely on berries. Many thrushes will have migrated to France and Italy where they are favourites of the gunners.

A year or two ago I saw gunners in Portugal bagging song thrushes which were roasted in the local vende (inn). Fieldfares which come here from Scandinavia suffer in frosty weather too, 18 years ago during heavy snowfalls I found three dead in a small area near Chichester.

Back in the bad winter of 1916/17, the ornithologist John Walpole-Bond found hundreds of fieldfares dead on the downs and along the coastal fringe.

My research for the British Trust for Ornithology over a period of 46 years when I have carried out a continuous bird census over two areas of West Sussex woodland shows that one of the birds to be badly hit by cold is the wren. After the 1962/3 winter wrens dropped from 20 pairs in 180 acres of downland wood at Kingley Vale to only one pair.

Within three years they had bounced back. But each successive frosty spell put them down again but never so much as the 1962/3 winter. In that year I found hundreds of corpses of wading birds on the Norfolk coast.

Redshanks were badly hit but not so bad as the dunlin, which are the very tiny waders that rove in large flocks over all our Sussex mudflats. These were actually frozen by their beaks into the mudflats during that bitter winter 46 years ago.

Bewick's swans were also badly hit since these wild swans frequent fresh water floods and inland grazing meadows. I am worried about our green woodpeckers this year which do not like frosty weather. I actually saw one fall dead off an apple bough 46 years ago. It was pitifully thin when examined.

I concluded that meadow ants on which it fed, together with ground insects, were sealed under frost.

Woodcock have been plentiful this winter brought here by the first snowfalls of last October from Scandinavia. One rare bird that must have had a good winter is the red kite, introduced here by the RSPB several years ago.

They are scavengers and with the foxes will have cleared up the less fortunate. This year's CBC will be interesting to see just what effect this winter has had on Sussex bird life.