A POOLE man has claimed a British record for the number of wood pigeons counted in a morning as they flew over the harbour.

The air was grey with their clatter on Sunday as a phenomenal 161,275 birds were counted over four hours by Mark Constantine and wife Mo as they crossed over their house.

“They normally go over several days,” he said.

“What would normally move in four or five days all went in one morning.”

The pigeon passage of migrating British birds was probably heading for the beech mast and cork forests of Spain, he said.

He said they would have all gathered together to roost then taken to the air in groups, some of 50-60 and others several hundred strong.

The experienced bird watcher and counter said he had been watching out for the mass migration, which they were only just beginning to appreciate.

“Nobody really knew this was going on over our heads,” he said.

“I have been bird watching in the harbour for over 30 years. It’s only in the last 10 years we have really started to understand this.”

The UK’s largest and most common pigeon (around 2.7 million), the portly bird is largely grey with a white neck patch and white wing patches and its cooing call and loud clatter of wings when it flies away are distinctive.

“I don’t know why these huge flocks decide to form and leave, but they do,” said Paul Morton, information officer for the RSPB at the Arne reserve.

Mark pointed out that if each bird weighed 500g then more than eight tonnes of wood pigeon flew across Poole Harbour.

“It’s an amazing spectacle, quite phenomenal to watch,” said Paul, who urged families to get out and try to identify flocks of migrating birds – such as the 7,000 song thrushes seen a few years ago.

Mass migrations happen every autumn and as well as UK birds leaving to return in the spring, we get species from further afield. Britain is currently enjoying an influx of waxwings from Scandinavia.

• The weekend gales blew in a rare visitor from North America to Weymouth’s Radipole Lake, a wader called a long billed dowitcher, one or two of which turn up every other winter.