Birds, Mammals and Wildlife Gardening – The Big Freeze

Cold is actually not a big problem for birds in the physical sense because those which are adapted to live in this country are equipped with a layer of fluffy, insulating down inside the flight feathers, which traps heat. In fact, Brent geese, swans and dunlins which migrate here from Eastern Europe and the Arctic probably find it a little too warm at times!

However there is a survival test related to cold weather, and it is the necessity for birds to find food and ensuring they get enough of it to maintain adequate fat supplies. This is a tough task and many birds die in winter through exhaustion or starvation, but the task becomes even tougher in extreme weather when snow and ice hide evidence natural food: water birds may be forced to leave iced-over lakes and the soil surface becomes too hard for birds like thrushes and lapwings to probe, while snow hides both sight and smell of natural foods like berries, acorns and seeds.

The ability to fly gives birds a fighting chance and can cause dramatic alterations in the birdlife of your garden as they move to areas that are less affected by the weather or where food is still readily available. Heavy winter weather can also mean a change in behaviour rather than a change of location – birds may be forced to feed at an accelerated rate by shorter days etc, but must also take adequate time out to rest and conserve energy.

The smallest birds, like blue tits and wrens actually need to feed right through the hours of daylight in winter and consume as much as 30% of their body weight to create the necessary fat reserves to get through the long, cold nights. At this point jays turn to the 'larders' they prepared in autumn when food was plentiful and dig deep in the snow to find the stores of acorn they stashed. If you happen to be near a hospital, factory or shopping centre in the late afternoon, you might see large numbers of pied wagtails clustering together on the roof to take advantage of the warmth coming from the building.

Birds, mammals and wildlife gardening swans photograph by Tony Austin, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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