Rare visitors fly in

Tuesday 18 November 2014

Two very rare birds have been spotted in Jersey much to the delight of local twitchers who have seen twice the number of birds flocking to feed at their conservation sites than this time last year.

Over the last two weekends ornithologists have come across a Little Bunting and a Serin feeding in a field in St Mary – one that’s flown in from the far north and the other from warmer climes in the south.

Cris Sellarés from conservation group Birds on The Edge said they were shocked to find the tiny birds in their nets among the record 342 they managed to ring and release during the two weekends.

The group have secured more fields this year, mainly on the Island’s west and north coast and have been working with farmers to encourage more birds to fly in for a good feed this winter.

Cris said: “We’re using fields used for the Jersey Royal, after they are harvested farmers usually put in a winter crop, maize, barley so that’s when we squeeze in one of these winter bird crops instead with a mixture of food for the birds – things like millet, barley, mustard seeds, quinoa – to give them energy and nutrients. It looks like a field of weeds but it’s great.

“It’s been very successful, the number of birds are proving that it’s definitely working, we’re keeping vast amounts of birds alive and feeding in the winter. If these fields weren’t here, we wouldn’t have these birds in Jersey.”

The little bunting is the smallest bunting of this part of the world that is usually found in the boreal and arctic taiga of the far north-east of Europe and northern Asia. It usually winters in India and China.

The serin is the smallest of finches found in Europe. They are mainly Mediterranean, with only one or two breeding pairs in the whole of the British Isles.