Pied flycatchers are summer migrants largely attached to the oakwoods of western Britain and thinly spread from Cornwall to Caithness. In Derbyshire, I’m lucky if I encounter them half a dozen times, so to see 24 in a morning signals that this Herefordshire site is very special. There are 30 pairs all in nest boxes and all part of a ringing project. Even more remarkable is that my friend Rachel Jenkins, who oversees these “pied flys”, is continuing a ringing tradition that was begun by her father, Peter McDougall, in the 1960s. Between them, they have banded and observed the breeding successes of thousands of birds.
Their work at Moccas, with that of several fellow devotees, reveals how bird migration is one of those deep wells of everyday mystery that provokes perennial wonder and astonishing revelation. Take, for instance, the fact that pied flycatchers retain an echo of their post-glacial behaviour. All the world’s population still pours out of west Africa (and their exact location is still largely unknown), then up through Spain into Europe.
