Adrian Thomas
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Adrian Thomas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, one of the things about birds is that they have a body temperature that's quite high.
It's 40 degrees, but they can't sweat.
They have no sweat glands.
So it all has to be through the mouth.
So if you see a bird with its bill open, that's probably because it's trying to lose heat, which is lost through its respiratory tract.
Some birds have an even stranger technique.
But you also see birds, in particular wood pigeons in my garden, which like to sit in the bird bath.
What they're doing is they're cooling down as well as bathing at that point.
And they can sit there for a good half hour, soaking up the water into their feathers.
They actually have this curious thing called powder down.
They don't have feathers.
oil glands in order to keep their plumage fresh they have powder that is little bits of feather that break off and allow the pigeons to preen that through their feathers to keep them in good nick and when they sit in the bird bath for half an hour and get out you'll often see this slick on top of the water that is this powder down that they're cleaning out from their feathers
I'm Adrian Thomas and I'm the RSPB's wildlife gardening expert.
So yeah, there's all sorts of behaviours that you might spot with garden birds in hot weather.
But one thing that you kind of don't spot is bird activity.
And that is when birds really are too hot.
And that thing of disappearing into shade where they just sit and do nothing.
It can lead many people to think, where have my garden birds gone?
Well, they're doing what we're doing.
Where we're underneath our parasols, they're tucked away in deep cover, just trying to see these conditions through.
Showing 1–20 of 48 · page 1 of 3
Next →