Migrant birds quiz

The answers...


1 b) Birds migrate in search of food. Food is abundant in warm, sunny places, and nearly absent in dark, snowy locations. What's more, food is more plentiful in places with longer days than nights, and long days give birds more time to hunt for food.

2 c) It is the change in daylight hours that spurs birds to fatten up for the long flight ahead. Weather can be unpredictable, but the number of daylight hours changes in the same way each year.

3 b) The greater noctule bat is the only bat known to hunt birds on the wing. Studies in Spain indicate that during the spring and autumn nocurnal migration of passerines, or songbirds, over the Mediterranean, as much as 70% of greater noctule bat droppings contain the remains of birds.

4 a) British swallows spend their winter in South Africa. They travel through western France, across the Pyrenees, down eastern Spain into Morocco, and across the Sahara.

5 b) According to the BTO's Migration Atlas, some experienced birds are able to average 186 miles per day (300 km) on their return to the UK.

6 d) All three. Their breeding grounds are mainly in Scandinavia, however, about 50 - 100 breeding pairs have now colonised the Highlands of Scotland, and they also breed in Iceland. The Icelandic birds are larger and more strongly marked than average, and most likely to be found in the west of Britain and Ireland where they winter.

7 a) In years when the rowan berry crop is large, fieldfares will remain close to their breeding ground well into the winter. In other years, when the crop is poor, the birds leave more quickly and so make an earlier appearance in the UK.

8 c) By sleeping with half of its brain at a time, the swift lives a perpetually aerial life, coming down only for a short period each year to breed.

More fun quizzes....