Birds, Mammals and Wildlife Gardening – Migration Feeding

Before heading South in the autumn, many summer birds must prepare themselves for the long journey. The process is controlled by hormones which subtly alter the metabolism of the birds, enabling them to store the energy needed for the flight and to build up the muscles need to undertake the rigorous journey.

Some birds will stop off on the way to feed while others will undertake the whole journey in a single non-stop flight. Birds like swifts and swallows store very little fuel as they can feed on the wing.

Fat is an ideal way for birds to store fuel and one gram of it produces about nine kilocalories of energy. This is better than carbohydrate, which not only provides a fraction of the energy, but is also less easy to store as it weighs more due to its associated water molecules, and weight poses a major problem for migrating birds - the heavier a bird is, the more energy it uses in flight, and therefore more fat must be stored.

Surprisingly while most small songbird migrants are insect-eaters they switch their diet to fruits in autumn and you can help them get ready for migration by giving soaked raisins and ripe bananas which allow them convert the sugars into fatty. Those songbirds which feed on fruits will find plenty available at stop-over points as they progress south in the autumn, where they ripen earlier.

Some warblers will actually feed on nectar, rather than insects, when preparing to migrate and others feed especially on aphids, which have a higher sugar content than other invertebrates.

Birds, mammals and wildlife gardening swallow photograph by foxypar4, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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