Summer Visitors
About 60 species are mainly summer visitors which breed in Britain but winter further south, mainly in Africa. A large number of these are insectivores such as warblers, flycatchers and Common Cuckoo, as would be expected from the scarcity of insects in British winters.
Several seabirds move out to sea after breeding, and terns and some auks are absent during the winter months.
In 2007, 16 million birds flew from Africa to Britain. Swifts have declined 40% between 1994 and 2007. Nightingales are down 60% since 1994, wood warblers 67% down, turtle doves 66% down, spotted flycatchers down 59%, and cuckoos down 37%.
Read more about this topic: British Avifauna
Famous quotes containing the words summer and/or visitors:
“As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)