UK bird migration calendar: what to see season by season

Spring (March–May): arrivals and song

Summer migrants pour in from Africa: warblers fill the scrub, terns return to the coast, and reedbeds boom with bitterns establishing territories. Avocets settle onto lagoon islands to breed — spring is the season our wetland reserve pages list them as near-guaranteed.

Marsh harriers begin their sky-dancing display flights over the larger reedbeds. It is the best season for a first visit to almost any wetland reserve.

Summer (June–July): seabird cities

The action moves to the coast, where hundreds of thousands of gannets, puffins and kittiwakes pack breeding cliffs. England's largest colony towers over the Yorkshire coast at Bempton, with puffins reliable until mid-July.

Inland, breeding continues quietly — spoonbill colonies, once a rarity, now fledge young at restored wetlands in both Norfolk and Yorkshire.

Autumn (August–October): passage

Migration runs in reverse and anything can turn up. Wader numbers build on estuaries through August, bearded tits 'erupt' from reedbeds in October, and kingfishers disperse to reserves they don't breed at. On the biggest tides of the Wash, tens of thousands of knot pack together in one of Britain's greatest wildlife spectacles.

Winter (November–February): the wildfowl season

The UK's mild estuaries host millions of wintering ducks, geese and waders from the Arctic. Pink-footed geese leave their roosts in dawn skeins tens of thousands strong, and reedbed reserves offer the year's best chance of a bittern in the open, frozen out of cover.

Winter is also the most beginner-friendly season: the birds are big, numerous and visible all day. Check any reserve page's species-by-season table before you travel — it is refreshed as part of our seasonal update loop.