EXHAUSTED and disoriented garden birds are dropping from the sky into the sea off England's south coast.

Fishermen have reported seeing hundreds of common migratory birds plunging to the deaths in the past week.

“While fishing about 10 miles south of Portsmouth, we witnessed thousands of garden birds disorientated, land on the sea and most drowning,” one boat skipper told Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

“Species included goldcrests, robins, thrushes and blackbirds. The sky was thick with garden birds. I estimate I saw 500 birds die and that was just in our 300-yard sphere.

“On the way home we just saw dead songbirds in the water: it was a harrowing sight.”

RSPB conservation director Martin Harper said the scale of the deaths was shocking and could affect the survival of the bird species.

Experts believe the birds fell victim to a combination of fog and heavy winds as they travelled across the north sea from Scandinavia.

“We think that these birds left Scandinavia in good weather conditions, which is what birds are evolved to do, and they were drifting along the North Sea where they encountered the foggy conditions that we had a few weeks ago,” Graham Madge of the RSPB told Radio 4's Material World programme.

“We started receiving reports from fishermen along the south coast ... saying that there boat was surrounded by hundreds of birds many of which were just so tired and disorientated that they dropped into the sea.

“This is particularly unusual; it's birds like thrushes, robins and a whole variety of other species that can be very good long distance migrants.”

