Sleeping place for 1mio of bramblings in eastern Slovakia in winter 20/21

Jana

Jana

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
Every few years, large invasion of wintering Bramblings enters Slovakia and creates a central sleeping place in some forested valley. Single flocks collect food during the day in large area tens of kilometers away, but they all collect at one place to sleep. This winter, a sleeping place was found neear village Krompachy in eastern Slovakia, used at least since 10th of December. Ornitologists tried to count the birds when they were arriving at evening of 4th of January and came to minimum estimate of 1.180.000 birds.

 
Amazing stuff. I love Bramblings. We only usually get odd birds here. Saw a group of maybe half-a-dozen on New Year's Day and was very pleased with that. Came across a flock of around 30 in 2018 and was stunned. Over a million of them is something else!
 
Maguari said:
Amazing stuff. I love Bramblings. We only usually get odd birds here. Saw a group of maybe half-a-dozen on New Year's Day and was very pleased with that. Came across a flock of around 30 in 2018 and was stunned. Over a million of them is something else!
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I do too. Two years ago in February I came across flocks of hundreds of them feeding under beech trees in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire. Watched them from the car and the forest floor was alive with them and the buzzing noise they make. You could see white rumps flashing everywhere. Biggest flocks I've ever seen.
 
In Czechia, we also get only smaller flocks during winter so this is a rare sight for me too. We lack large beech forests here.

A record so far in eastern Slovakia was winter 08/09 when their roosting place near village Gelnica (ca 3 km south from Krompachy site) was visited by groups of Slovak and Hungarian ornitologists. Because they had enough people, they were placed to different valleys leading to Gelnica so they could count separated streams of birds coming from different feeding sites to roost. They counted 3.500.000 bramblings during 2 hours before darkness came that evening.
 
I was lucky to see a similar flock once in Switzerland, which I estimated as over 1 m Bramblings. For 30 minutes, there was an unbroken stream of thousands of birds flying into the forest, and I could see another stream flying from another direction.

This year, there was again a roost of at least 2 million Bramblings in Switzerland.
 
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