SPECIES WOODPIGEON
They’re a bird you see every day, but Woodpigeons are a great deal more adventurous than you might think
For me, one of the best things about watching and studying nature is that I am always learning. No matter how much I think I know about a species, there is always something else to discover about it, even the common, everyday birds that we all take a bit for granted.
The Woodpigeon is one such, and I suspect that a large number of us will have them lumbering around the garden, hoovering up the dropped crumbs underneath the bird feeders or building unfeasibly fragile-looking nests in a tree. They are familiar birds indeed.
With more than 5,000,000 breeding pairs in Britain and a nationwide distribution, the Woodpigeon is a bird that most birders probably don’t look twice at. Once added to the year list they are given little attention, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t remarkable.
For example, in Britain we don’t tend to think of the Woodpigeon as being a migrant. Our birds are largely resident – some localised movements may occur, but these aren’t birds that migrate.
But Woodpigeons aren’t just found in Britain.
They have a range that encompasses most of Europe and in many parts of this range they are a migratory species. Birds that breed in Scandinavia and in the central and eastern parts of the continent migrate south-west in the winter.
This was something that I knew before, but what I didn’t know was the sheer scale of these movements. When Woodpigeons move, they do so in large numbers, and they do so all at once.
I recently saw some data from survey work in the western Pyrenees, on the French/Spanish border. This mountain range has a number of passes that act as migration funnels, with birds literally pouring through them during autumn passage. Woodpigeons move relatively late in the autumn compared to other species, with the beginning of November being the peak time. I was staggered by the numbers recorded.
On just one day in 2022, the 8 November to be precise, 1,547,975 individual Woodpigeons flew through the mountain passes. Over 1.5 million birds in one day – that’s incredible! I have seen some large flocks of Woodpigeon in my time, but… birdwatching.co.uk
In total, the survey counted about 3.5 million birds travelling through the passes during the late autumn. Of course, Woodpigeons don’t migrate individually, they do so in flocks and those three and a half million birds were spread between just fewer than 3,000 flocks, that�
