Wales: Let’s Molt!

Late summer is notoriously one of the most challenging times to see passerines in the northern hemisphere: adults, the rigors of the breeding season behind them and the challenge of migration ahead, retire to the darkness of the hedges and sulk, renewing their feathers and their spirit for the cold season coming up.

European Robin, that bird so familiar even to us North Americans from Christmas cards and children’s books, is a prime example. We heard dozens of them on our visit to the United Kingdom, their sharp Passerina-like chip issuing from every hedge and thicket and the occasional song trickling up the scale. But see ‘em? We could count on one hand the number of good sightings we had of this abundant and normally so confiding species. The adults were in molt, nervous and secretive, and few were the individuals who dared emerge from their hiding places with us in the neighborhood.

This scruffy little guy (they can’t be sexed in the field, so far as I know) was lured from his leafy bunker only by the abundance of small caterpillars under the fence; as the top rail bears witness, the bird had evidently been feeding here for a while.

Even skulkier were the spotted and scaled juveniles, giving just the odd glimpse from inside the dense vegetation. But this bird, newly molted into the freshest and snazziest of first-winter plumages, was proud enough to sit in the tree just above our heads for as long as we chose to admire:

Ah, youth!

Of course, the robins aren’t alone in getting their new coats. Adult House Sparrows too were looking a little rough around the edges.

And Lesser Black-backed Gulls were showing those odd white covert bars so typical of molting larids.

A bird in the open, said Ogden Nash, never looks / like its picture in the birdy-books. I think he must have been birding in August.