A mockingbird in my bathroom

The big, round, wall-clock over the shaving-mirror in the bathroom has been on probation since Christmas, a present from America that had to find its own niche, as it were, in our domestic affairs.

A cuckoo-clock is one thing, but a timepiece that pipes up electronically with the songs of twelve different east-coast American birds, each with its picture at the relevant hour, could be quite a test of enthusiasm. Did we want our lives to be parsed, however subliminally, by the yank-yank-yank (repeated twice) of the white-breasted nuthatch, at every 11 o'clock, or the warbling of the black-capped chickadee at eight?

A quarantine in the loo seemed a good way of ensuring a measured and gradual acquaintance, governed generously by chance. It was some weeks before I was startled by the tufted titmouse, exactly at five, or the flamered northern cardinal on the dot of nine.

Both birds remind me, as it happens, of a sortie with binoculars to the birch woods around Boston one chill, grey Sunday in March, in the company of a young Irish embassy attache charged with entertaining me. The bright face he put on the expedition earned full professional marks: I hope he has gone far.

So yes, I've become rather fond of them all - the mourning dove hooting funereally at seven, the American robin carolling at one. There is a light sensor meant to guarantee silence at night, but what happens when I blunder in there on the stroke of 2 a.m.? I get jeered by a mockingbird, that's what.

Meanwhile, in the real world of birds beyond the bathroom window, a precocious dawn chorus has been mounting for two or three weeks. The winter song of robins is familiar enough, but song thrush, blackbird and dunnock are all singing along together at breakfast-time, their voices flattered and amplified by the acoustic of The Hollow and its stream.

The arrival of grey wagtails (with bright yellow bellies) to nest along the stream is my favourite confirmation of spring. My wildlife diary takes note of them on the same date - March 28th - in 1990 and 1995, and almost three weeks earlier, on March 8th, last year. This year I met a pair of grey wagtails, skipping together on the boreen near the next stream along the hill, on January 13th: at this time in winter, they should be off in a little flock somewhere, and roosting communally at night.

While trying not to jump to conclusions, I shall be watching all the birds on the acre more attentively over the next couple of months. A trend to earlier nesting was established five years ago in a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology. In a study of more than 30,000 nests, it found more than one-third of species - and nearly half of the migrants - nesting earlier, by anything up to 22 days. There's a consensus that they're responding to global warming, and have probably been doing so since the mid1970s.

Extra warmth obviously helps the survival of chicks. Food supply is even more relevant, and only an earlier abundance of insect life could make the gamble of early breeding worthwhile. It's suggested that migrant warblers, among others, are choosing to give their fledglings more time to toughen up for the rigours of the return flight to Africa.

If all this is true, it's a remarkably speedy piece of adaptation. And it sits rather oddly with the scene at the peanut feeder outside my study window, which continues to be one of unbridled, mid-winter rapacity.

The nut supply has brought greenfinches to the acre for the first time and they have dominated the feeder for weeks. Their brilliance of colour, even at this season, makes the cock birds bright as parakeets, but their aggression is rather less attractive: they spend half their time flying at each other or threatening with thrust-out heads and open beaks.

This bully-boy behaviour establishes a peck-order in the little flock and matches its size - half a dozen - to the amount of food available (the greenfinches that never get a look-in hang around for a while, then move on). But other species are getting their share of nuts by sheer persistence. Thus, a couple of goldfinches hold their own at the feeder, day after day, and a coal-tit (another newcomer, attracted to our conifers) dashes in and out to snatch morsels of nut for its private larder. Blue and great tits, chaffinches, robins and house sparrows make up a record variety of species - sometimes three or four different kinds of bird hanging on the tube.

The diversity and welfare of the birds of the Irish countryside is the concern of a new annual survey organised as a joint project by BirdWatch Ireland and the National Parks and Wildlife Service. In Britain, the BTO's Common Birds Census has shown drastic declines in the number of common farmland birds such as skylark, linnet and bullfinch, and an RSPB survey in Northern Ireland added whitethroats and spotted flycatchers to the species becoming scarce.

In the Republic, there are strong impressions of decline (of the yellowhammer, as one example), but no long-term data. The Countryside Bird Survey will be monitoring population levels of our breeding birds across a wide variety of habitats. Fieldwork volunteers are being asked to make just three visits in the year to specially allocated sample zones, each one kilometre square. The first visit contacts the landowner and sets up a survey route: the others, from April to June, record the breeding birds on a 90minute walk in the early morning.

This is work for bird-watchers who are confident of identifying species by their song (breeding birds are not always conveniently on display), and BirdWatch Ireland is in the midst of one-day training sessions at various centres around the country. They can still use more volunteers, especially in counties where bird-watchers are thin behind the bushes: contact John Murphy or Sinead McDonnell at Ruttledge House, 8 Longford Place, Monkstown, Co Dublin 01-2804322.