What weighs less than a triple A battery but doesn’t need a battery to power its flight from the UK across the Sahara Desert to Gambia or Senegal and back, several times in its lifetime?

What weighs less than a CD but sings its frenzied, jagged and joyous song for hours on end each spring day…and sounds so much better than a lot of CD ‘music’?

And what weighs a mere third of the weight of a lightbulb and yet illuminates each moment in which you are lucky enough to see one?

The answer is a Sedge Warbler. Weighing in at no more than about 13g this particular little marvel is a living embodiment of the endlessly fascinating, boundlessly awe-inspiring marvel of migration. It proved to be the first classic spring migrant we heard, saw, studied and enjoyed on our Marvels of Migration walk – and it was the perfect curtain-raiser for a perfect morning of good birding, good weather and great companionship.

The stripey Sedge Warbler issued forth his super-charged, jangled but never jarring song from brambles and reeds just feet from our viewing position, playing hide and seek at first but then showing his shivering, quivering body to all. Fresh in over the last few days from his winter home some 3,000 miles away to the south-west, where he’d lurked in some Senegalese or Gambian wetland, it was astonishing to think that after such a long, potentially hazardous flight he still had the energy to belt out his song with such unrelenting gusto. 

It wasn’t that the Sedge Warbler is especially rare – although it is ‘Amber listed’ so we shouldn’t take anything for granted. No. What was really so spellbinding was the thought that this waif of a bird, within its tiny 13cm-long frame, characterised perfectly the wonderment of bird migration. Migration – it’s what the dictionaries describe, prosaically, as ‘the seasonal movement from one region to another’. That’s about as flat and bland a definition as there could possibly be of any word in the English language. It almost criminally underplays what truly is a wonder-filled miracle.

In our two-location introduction to this phenomenon we encountered more examples of ‘seasonal movement’. Swallows, for example. This well-known and well-loved global traveller was seen in small numbers, seemingly arriving a little later this year due to recent bitingly cold winds. Chiffchaffs too. In contrast to the Swallows, these have been ‘chiff-chaffing’ in profusion in recent weeks, seemingly in thankfully increasing numbers and perhaps some of them changing their migratory strategies to stay ‘closer to home’ as our UK winters become less hostile as the world’s climate descends frighteningly into chaos.

Some of the longest distances in bird migration are covered by globe-trotting wader species. On our walk, wader movement was best characterised by two male Ruff, a species which overwinters in relatively small numbers in the UK, but which is more often seen as a transitory passage migrant en route from, say, the river floodplains of West Africa to the wild wetlands of northern and eastern Europe. Icelandic Black-tailed Godwits, many already in their stunning summer finery, also exemplified the sense of migratory movement that was so evident throughout this most enjoyable morning’s birding.

At the appointed hour it was time for our own mini-migration, and we became ‘birds of passage’ on the little country lanes that led back to Chillesford. The Sedge Warbler that had so enthralled us had fuelled his astonishing 3,000-mile journey by feasting on insects. Our fuel, a famed Froize feast, was, thanks to our host David’s unmatched culinary skills, certainly more to our taste than the warbler’s hotch-potch of invertebrates! It was, as it always is, an absolute delight. And then some.

John Grant

Species seen or heard, in no particular order:

1. Mute Swan

2. Canada Goose

3. Greylag Goose

4. Barnacle Goose

5. Shelduck

6. Egyptian Goose

7. Mallard

8. Gadwall

9. Pintail

10. Shoveler

11. Wigeon

12. Teal

13. Tufted Duck

14. Pheasant

15. Red-legged Partridge

16. Cormorant

17. Grey Heron

18. Little Egret

19. Red Kite

20. Marsh Harrier

21. Common Buzzard

22. Kestrel

23. Coot

24. Moorhen

25. Oystercatcher

26. Avocet

27. Lapwing

28. Ruff

29. Redshank

30. Black-tailed Godwit

31. Black-headed Gull

32. Mediterranean Gull

33. Herring Gull 

34. Lesser Black-backed Gull

35. Stock Dove

36. Wood Pigeon

37. Great Spotted Woodpecker

38. Skylark

39. Swallow

40. Meadow Pipit

41. Wren

42. Dunnock

43. Song Thrush

44. Blackbird

45. Robin

46. Stonechat

47. Blackcap

48. Sedge Warbler

49. Cetti’s Warbler

50. Chiffchaff

51. Great Tit

52. Blue Tit

53. Jackdaw

54. Carrion Crow

55. Rook

56. Starling

57. Chaffinch

58. Reed Bunting

59. Yellowhammer

60. Pied Wagtail.