On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer - and Vixen

ANOTHER LIFE:Mirabile dictu, I spotted not just one, but a group of five red squirrels foraging for ripe cones on the Japanese larches on Hellfire Hill, overlooking Dublin, recently. It is the first time in almost 20 years I have seen them there.

Michael Fewer, Dublin 16

Outside Virginia, Co Cavan, a startled bird flew from the hedgerow. It made the blackbird’s alarm call, but it had a brown head and pure white body plumage. It did not have a red beak.

Justin Doyle, Athboy, Co Meath

It was a leucistic or partially albino female blackbird.

In early September, I met a huge, fat, pink caterpillar on Mangerton Mountain, Co Kerry. It was about six inches long and looked like a load of raspberries strung together. It moved like a regular caterpillar and didn’t seem to be bothered by water as it was wandering in and out of puddles.

Katherine Finn, Spencer Dock, Dublin

It was the four-inch caterpillar of the goat moth, which spends two to four years burrowed in the heart wood of a tree, usually willow. It forms a cocoon from wood dust and its own silk and pupates on the ground. This year has been remarkable for reports of goat moth caterpillars.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.

THE NATURAL history of Christmas was impulsively launched in this column some years ago as a promising serial theme for an indefinite number of Decembers. I began comfortably with holly and ivy, those mid-winter pledges of enduring life, and the pagan decoration of spruce trees as revived in Victorian England by Prince Albert.

Mistletoe warranted scrutiny of its strange botanical habits and very local Irish presence as an alien parasite (even its myths are Norse). Wrens had legitimate cultural origins in folk magic; robins rather less so, their Christmas card PR launched by the red-breasted uniforms of early English postmen.

Yule logs supported an essay on the flammability of ash, oak, birch and turf briquettes. The spices and nuts of Christmas puddings and mulled wines justified excursions to tropical vines, bushes and trees. Capercaillie and mead recalled indigestions past; caviar and sturgeon, the high points of tigerish over-indulgence.

This leaves me, for the moment, with reindeer, seen a month ago accompanying Santa to the precincts of the big shopping centre in Ballymena, Co Antrim, an event duly sanctioned in advance by the Parades Commission for a joyous assemby for no more than 10,000 citizens, many astride their fathers’ shoulders.

The history of Christmas reindeer, to no one's surprise, is far from natural. A search for their place in the seasonal charade leads initially to a poem, The Night Before Christmas, supposedly written by a Manhattan biblical scholar, Clement Clarke Moore, for his children in 1823. It became extraordinarily famous ("when all through the house/not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse . . .') and planted in the gullible human psyche the image of St Nicholas zooming in on a flying sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. The story of a ninth, Rudolph, was written in 1939 for a chain of US department stores, which gave it away by the million, and the mind-infesting jingle was first conceived and vocalised a decade later.

Moore’s claim to originality has recently been challenged by a Vassar English professor who finds him lifting the poem from the work of a New Yorker of Dutch descent, Henry Livingston, who also wrote of the Norse god Thor and his chariot pulled by flying goats. But the possible plagiarism didn’t stop one of Moore’s handwritten copies of the poem selling for $211,000 at a Christie’s auction in 1997. (Thank you, Google; have a happy holiday.)

Reindeer (caribou in the US) are among the lost mammals of Ireland, surviving the last ice cover in the company of giant deer, bears and wolves, but extinct by the time the first hunters arrived. Today, they range gregariously through much of northern Russia and parts of Norwegian and Swedish Lapland, and migrate seasonally between treeless tundra, mountain and forest. The traditional, semi-wild reindeer herding by Norway’s Sami people is increasingly threatened as new hydropower and mining projects, wind farms and holiday cabins fragment their habitat.

Some readers may recall enjoyable TV scenes last Christmas of the chaotic Lapland theme park in marquees in the UK’s New Forest, where discontented parents thumped Santa Claus and the elves while reindeer fled across the mud. From this, and the Ballymena event, it is fair to deduce that herds of reindeer are alive and well in these islands, their commercial appearances at Christmas helping to pay for their keep.

They come, indeed, from a “free range” herd of reindeer in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains, where, 50 years ago, a visiting Swedish reindeer herder, Mikel Utsi, noticed the plentiful supply of ground and tree lichens ignored by native red deer and other local ungulates. He brought in some of his reindeer as an experiment, founding a herd that stands today at some 150 animals.

All the deer in today’s herd have been born there, and many are tame enough to wear bells, pose on the mountains for family snaps, and even trot on clicking heels to their annual engagements in Ballymena, Cardiff and elsewhere. Others, as visitors to the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre at Aviemore are warned, stay friskily wild and may take violent exception to the sound of mobile phones.

In Ireland, "reindeer moss" – actually the lovely grey filigree lichen Cladonia rangiferina— is scarce enough to earn a place on the Red Data List of endangered species. It grows around hummocks on some of the surviving raised bogs of the midlands, but architects who stick the moss onto their urban models to simulate trees and hedges are, one trusts, buying imported stuff from a garden centre.

In the far north of Russia, where the moss grows abundantly, reindeer herders complain that climate change is melting the snow too soon in spring, making it harder for the deer to pull their sleds. But on the night before Christmas, watch out for Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, not to mention Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen. And leave the mobile switched off, just in case.