Every winter Bird Watching receives plenty of queries about winter migrants, and especially passerines, and how they make long and hazardous crossings of the North Sea in sometimes appalling conditions.
Redwings and Fieldfares are often prominent among those, but relatively little is known for certain about just how many arrive each year, how many perish during the journey, and why. There are plenty of records, from ships and oil rigs, of exhausted birds simply dropping into the sea.
‘Guesstimates’ of roughly a million of each species arriving in the UK each year have been made, of about a million Redwings and a million Fieldfares arriving in the UK every winter. Winter thrushes will be the subject of a new survey by the BTO next winter, aiming to get a better handle on numbers and distribution.
In the meantime, birdwatchers are being asked to enter their records of winter thrushes into BirdTrack, to help plan next winter’s survey in more detail.
You can record any Redwings or Fieldfare sightings here
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