Listening to things that go korrk-kok! in the night

There, as the “fern owl”, it has been watched by Richard Mabey. When the song stops and the bird takes wing, he writes, “a branch seems to break free and float towards you, and suddenly the fern-owl is glancing over the tops of the trees, narrow wings arched above its back and bouncing, as if it were being tugged like a kite up towards the night sky”.

EVERY MORNING FOR weeks on end the spring medley of birdsong on the acre was shouted down by a rasping, penetrating squawk – korrk-kok! – married to a loud whirr of wing beats. At times last month this erupted every five or 10 minutes, sometimes making me jump just the other side of the hedge.

The cock pheasant’s advertising call can carry well over a kilometre, and a note of desperation (or so I fancied) began to creep into it. Then yesterday, hearing a different sound – a chuckling rather than a crowing – I glanced between the hawthorn to catch cock pursuing hen in low flight across the stone walls. The gun club hadn’t let him down after all.

Once heard, the pheasant’s proclamation is unmistakable, and it ceases by sundown. Some bird sounds at dusk and after can be powerfully mysterious. You tend to remember, for example, where you were at first encounter with the “drumming” of a snipe. (For me, one young, boozy night in the Dublin mountains: “Bloody hell!” cried someone, in the awed silence afterwards.)

Drumming is not a good word for the eerie, resonant huhuhuhuhuhuhuhu! of the snipe’s 45-degree plunge above one’s head, wings and outer tail feathers angled to tease vibrations from the air. “Heatherbleat” is one old name for the bird.

This summer, however, seems notable for another night sound, a cricket-like chirring, often at dusk, going on for ages like somebody’s sewing machine. Its mystery is doubled by one’s doubt about direction: just where in that shadowy thicket . . ? As Gilbert White described, it “seems to be close by, though at a hundred yards’ distance, and when close at your ear is scarce any louder than when a great way off”.

Now we have videos on YouTube, and one of them, shot in England last month (youtube.com/watch?v=dscCXMXYG7w) offers several minutes with a grasshopper warbler in a roadside bramble patch, swivelling its head from side to side as it chirrs.

It’s a summer regular to Ireland from west Africa, but birders have been reporting exceptional arrivals. (“Had seven groppers on Mizen today,” read one shorthand entry on their online network, IBN.)

Male grasshopper warblers, once tucked away and switched on, tend to stay put in one spot as they chirr, and, even when spotted, they will often carry on obligingly while you’re moving in for a close-up.

Nightjars, with their own, distinctive variation on the theme, are far less accessible and, being masters of camouflage, manage to look quite unbirdlike even when singing from the top of a bushy tree.

The hypnotic advertising call of the male, rising and falling in the dusk, was once so widely known in Ireland that it earned the bird the name of túirne lín, or spinning wheel. It loved “low, scrubby woods on hillsides”, wrote Richard Ussher in the late 1800s, “and heaths bordering plantations. In such places several may be heard churring at the same time.”

Today perhaps fewer than 30 pairs arrive from southern Africa to breed. This is part of a general decline in western Europe, although some of Coillte’s young, restocked conifer plantations may help provide new habitat.

The nightjar family is Caprimulgidae, a name that chimes in odd support of an old country name of “goatsucker”. This sprang from a myth, as old as Aristotle and Pliny, that the wide gape of the nightjar’s bill was admirably made for sucking milk from goats and cows. In fact it’s rather like the open maw of a basking shark and, fringed with whiskers, lets the bird hoover up midges and moths as it flies.

The presence of nightjars on YouTube is fitful, with recordings of distant song that have to be turned up to full volume, and sparse, spooky footage of the bird in flight in the Netherlands or in clearings of the New Forest in England.

Which leaves, of course, the corncrake, well grounded in dense cover, Ireland’s iconic chorister of nights in May and June. In hard times some have begrudged the cost of paying farmers to mow their meadows inside-out, but 2010 did see the first rise in numbers in years.

These farmers’ grants have now been taken in house by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, leaving BirdWatch Ireland to manage its own corncrake habitats, in Mayo and on Donegal islands, with funding from the Heritage Council. Let’s hope it lasts.

Eye on nature

Over Easter weekend in northwest Donegal I heard a loud constant sound like the cicada you hear in France or Spain. It was much louder and more persistent than a grasshopper’s chirping, and was constant in both pitch and duration. It came from a boggy field of untilled grass and weeds. I thought at first it was a bird, but I could see no birds around. We also saw a cuckoo and heard plenty more in Gortahork and heard corncrakes on Inishbofinne, just off the coast.

Pauline O’Hare, Knockbreda Road, Belfast

It was a grasshopper warbler. At Easter cuckoos were also heard on Skerries golf course, in north Co Dublin, and near Ballina, in Co Mayo.

A queen bee and her entourage swarmed down our street and were spotted by young Louis, who, with great excitement, called the street to witness. The swarm chose a deckchair to overnight. Tim the swarm collector arrived to take it away and gave the eager audience a spontaneous Q&A for over an hour. We were riveted. It was his 20th call-out in April to collect swarms.

Marjorie Bloch, Sunbury Avenue, Belfast

It’s very early for swarms:

A swarm in May is worth a load of hay,

A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon,

A swarm in July isn’t worth a fly.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address