ANOTHER LIFE:As trees grow tall on the acre and their canopies merge in a blur of green and gold, the bird life grows suddenly richer, if sometimes elusive, writes MICHAEL VINEY
The real cuckoo came, morning after morning, to perch somewhere on the wire just beyond the nesting collared doves and mock their imitations with its call – but as for spotting it through the leaves, not a hope. I knelt in the tunnel, weeding and planting out, while it yodelled over my head.
Other voices on the acre are excitingly new, freezing me to the spot. From the top of the ESB pole a cock mistle thrush rasps and chatters into the morning – a challenging, wide-beak utterance, nothing so sweet as the song thrush delivers. Even harsher, if far more inventive, is the torrent of sound from the little sedge warbler, roused by magpies from a nest beneath the willows.
But my warmest surprise has been the song of paired goldfinches from the ash beside the house. To have these brilliant birds – Ireland’s parakeets – at one’s feeders through the winter is a delight in itself. But they breed late in spring, laying eggs between mid May and early August, so that having them around the garden while the thrushes and tits are nesting is no firm promise of residence. Even as our male took up his territory I met a little flock of his fellows skipping away down the boreen.
His sweet, chirruping jingle was delivered while swivelling on his perch like one of those little clockwork toys you see on Antiques Roadshow. He was answered by his mate from a twig across the tree, an unusual bond of song. The birds flew off together, to a patch of grass we call a lawn. They fed on soft dandelion seeds, pulling them from swollen buds and scattering the silk.
A German biologist studying "seed preference and energy intake of goldfinches Carduelis carduelisin the breeding season" found (don't ask me how) that a male goldfinch consumes more oxygen feeding on dandelion and coltsfoot seed heads than when fed on loose, dry seeds.
Well gosh, work does need oxygen. But it takes this reductive kind of science to tackle simpler wonderings. Some of mine are about colour in nature. It does so many important and paradoxical things: recognition within species and warnings between them; also as concealing camouflage. In the blackness of deep ocean, pigmented colour has no meaning, but organisms are just as brilliant there, as they contain the same chemicals that colour marine life in the shallows.
Humans love bright colours for no very obvious reason. But the colours we see in nature are not the same as other species perceive them.
Bees and birds, for example, can see different, or extra, colours because their eyes are sensitive to ultraviolet light and ours are not. Blue tits use ultraviolet reflectance in choosing mates; kestrels see colour in rodent scent marks on the ground. Some biologists argue that ecologists whose studies depend on human perceptions of wild colour may be be wasting a lot of their efforts.
How goldfinches see each other’s bright red masks and yellow wing flashes I haven’t yet discovered. But the origin of both is in carotenoids, the organic pigments produced in plants. Googling found a bird breeder who feeds his caged goldfinches everything from red roses and tomatoes to pomegranates and cayenne pepper to help keep their faces red.
Science is only one way of relating to nature and certainly not enough on its own. I have been reading a deeply felt book by the poet Joseph Horgan, who was born in Birmingham of Irish parents and returned with his own family some years ago to the home countryside of Cork.
In The Song at Your Backdoor(The Collins Press, €12.99), he spends an autumn and winter walking and cycling along his local lanes and shores, dodging the bypass, hotels and new estates, to explore the natural world. His journey calls on a host of writers, from Barry Lopez and Gary Snyder to Heaney and Kavanagh, but what he urges is the experienced reality of nature, shorn of distancing through culture, science and art.
With the Maynooth geographer Prof Patrick Duffy, he laments that, for many Irish people today, “cyber worlds are more familiar than the local material landscape”. However, while “the tide may have gone out for good on the 31 words for seaweed”, he refuses also to filter his experience of the natural world through the inevitable sense of loss: “I do not wish to believe that nature is in the past”.
This is a book to be relished at many levels, from that of the simple lover of Ireland’s land and wildlife to that of the poet and contemplative. It roams away from, and comes back to, listening to a blackbird in the yard.
Eye on nature
In my camera-recorded blue-tit nest, the female had laid three eggs. While sitting to lay the fourth, the attentive mate brought her titbits and fussed over her
in an intimate domestic scene. But the male was a great tit! However, it seems the great tit was trying to take over the nest; there was a showdown, and the blues are now in charge.
Desmond Hall, Villierstown, Co Waterford
My son Alan was swimming near Spiddal over the kelp when he saw a small sausage-shaped jellyfish, about 50mm long, which had flashing red and green lights running up its body.
Barbara Browne, Knockmore, Co Mayo
It was the comb jelly,Beroe cucumis , which produces light-interference effects on the eight comb rows running along its body.
I observed a fox crossing O’Connell Street in Dublin, at the Parnell Street junction, and heading towards the grounds of the Rotunda Hospital.
Eddie Walsh, Marino, Dublin
On April 29th we heard three nightjars near Pontoon at 10pm.
Paul Smith, Pontoon, Co Mayo
We have two pairs of yellowhammers nesting in the gorse hedge, birds and flowers complementing each other.
Peter Pearson Evans, Foxrock, Dublin
- Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address