Autumn and Winter Birds
Ecologist Gill Thompson explores some of the birds you might encounter in Northumberland National Park during autumn and winter. We will be adding to this page as the seasons progress.
In the spring we looked at breeding birds; both our resident species and the ones that migrate to Northumberland. You can visit our Tweet Tuesday page here to revisit them.
Now it is autumn and heading into winter I will look at some of the birds that stay here and ones that visit from further north. Birds migrate to find food and good conditions to raise their young in spring, but in winter some also move to find food and weather conditions to allow them to survive the shorter, colder days in the northern hemisphere.
Many birds move from arctic and sub-arctic areas where, in the winter, it is too cold to live and there is little available food. Even Northumberland in mid-winter is preferable to Iceland, Greenland and Siberia!