Another Life: A tree without a bird is only half alive

Plucking the latest thatch of silver threads from my hairbrush, I open the bedroom window and leave the little wisp to shiver on the sill. It quickly vanishes, either from a puff of wind or from eager acquisition by a nest-building bird. I prefer, of course, the latter: a wren, perhaps, refining the comfort of its already cosy dome.

The mistle thrush in the Sitka at the gate prefers a springier lining. I watch it swoop away to the hillside and return with another tuft of sheep’s wool, snatched from last year’s bracken. It is never gone for long, for nest and tree are territory to be defended.

"The missel-thrush is, while breeding, fierce and pugnacious," noted Gilbert White, the famous curate of Selborne, "driving such birds as approach its nest, with great fury, to a distance." I can confirm this, as my first reminder this spring of the thrushes' affection for the tree was a rattling cry as the cock shot up like an Exocet to drive a passing raven from its regular flight path.

“Storm-cock” is an old, vernacular name for a bird imagined to predict bad weather, but it speaks even better for its martial, upright stance and general militancy. In winter it will monopolise every berry on a holly tree.

Its habit of nesting in a high fork asks for trouble. White describes magpies arriving mob-handed to storm a mistle-thrush nest. “The dams defended their mansion with great vigour and fought resolutely for hearth and home; but numbers at last prevailed; they tore the nest to pieces and swallowed the young alive.”

It’s a couple of decades since we finally dissuaded magpies from making the old Sitka their own. When we came to the house the crest of the wind-battered tree held a thick platform of twigs that spoke of many years of occupation.

It continued for many more, until we tired of the spring mayhem of the magpies’ murderous foraging. I had found, while beachcombing, an immensely long bamboo pole with a shiny hook at the end (less a boathook, perhaps, than for gaffing salmon from a bridge). Repeated assaults on the magpies’ nest finally secured their eviction.

Years after, watching the very tall and ageing Sitka bowing in the storms, we feared an eventual toppling straight across the road, and sought out a tree surgeon to lop off the top fathom.

Its spire regained, the crest is the storm cock’s favourite perch at sunset: a weathervane gazing out to sea. We are delighted with his tenancy, announced with a burst of clear, sharp song as long ago as February. In spring a tree without a bird seems only half alive.

Unexpectedly, the magpie got to Ireland first, a little flock arriving in Co Wexford on an east wind in 1679. The first record of the mistle thrush was in Antrim in 1808, with a rapid spread to every county. By 1853 the Dublin birder John Watters could rhapsodise over the "combined melody of a flock, perhaps consisting of eighty or a hundred birds, all singing in harmonious unison, as if murmuring some low sweet melody". This was in winter, when the Irish thrushes are often joined by migrant flocks from Scotland.

New colonisers continue to arrive and spread: little egrets, woodpeckers and, notably, the collared dove, now one of Ireland’s 20 most widespread garden birds. It arrived in 1959, flowing on from its occupation of the UK in the flood of expansion from Turkey and thereabouts in Asia.

An accidental introduction to Barbados in 1974 (don’t ask me) gave it a stepping stone to Florida and thence to great tracts of the United States, as far northwest as Washington and Oregon.

What sparked this explosive diaspora is, as usual, a mystery, but the capacity of young birds to disperse for up to 600km may have played a part. What lured it on seems to have been the abundant waste grain of crops and the abundant berries and seeds of suburban gardens.

Also, it must be said, garden bird feeders, which it now appears to know by sight. One alighted last week on a branch in the hawthorn outside my workroom window and waited there next to a feeder that was, as it happened, quite empty of nuts.

This let me savour the essential strangeness of the dove. It is far too smooth, for a start: a texture accentuated by the overall matt, dusty buff of its plumage – a colour to suit the more fashionably arcane choices from a Farrow & Ball designer paint chart. The little black chevron at its neck is another smart designer job. And then the eye is too round to be very innocent, as its plan for global takeover makes clear. But at least, for the moment, at Thallabawn, it has stopped its damned cu-cu-cu-cooing.

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks