Stony silence where once there was the chatter of a friend

ANOTHER LIFE:IN THE GENTLE SPRING soundtrack that ushers me along the boreen these mornings (the better mornings, that is), one sound has been missing from the general blend of birdsong, sea breeze and disassembling surf from the shore. Norman MacCaig had a nice phrase for it – "a flint-on-flint ticking" – but the stonechat's own name says it well enough.

MacCaig also found praise for “a tiny work of art / Bright as an illumination on a monkish parchment”, and that is the other reason I miss this little bird. It used to keep me company as I marched, bouncing along the fence ahead of me, post by post along its nesting territory, the bold black head, white collar, rosy breast as pert and assertive as its scolding call.

But when did it vanish and why? The questions were sharpened by an email from Wexford. Michael Lunt, a lifelong birder, has missed the stonechat both from his local fields and from those of Connemara. Nothing much has changed in habitats where it was common – coastal farmland with plenty of gorse or scrub – so its sudden absence was baffling.

Chats are scaled-down thrushes; that, at least, is their ornithological family. Nothing in build or diet seems to put the resident, insect-eating stonechat at a special disadvantage, and our most populous and widespread chat, the robin, is surely a born survivor. The stonechat’s continent-wide decline in Europe is just part of the general loss of birds brought about by intensive farming, but a sudden, dramatic disappearance needs extra explanation.

A study for the British Trust for Ornithology offered it some 50 years ago: stonechats are in trouble in really hard winters. The author, JD Magee, listed a series of severe British winters with dire impacts on the species, culminating in the memorable blizzards of my childhood in 1946-47.

“After this winter,” wrote Magee, “stonechats were greatly reduced even in Cornwall, one of the strongholds of the species, no breeding birds could be found anywhere in south Wales . . . The populations of eastern and central Scotland were also almost wiped out.”

The birds crept back in coastal areas, but in Suffolk, on England’s east coast, a slight increase took four years. Before our recent two harsh winters, BirdWatch Ireland’s countryside bird survey could

report that the stonechat, like the goldfinch, had “increased substantially over the past 10 years”. This may now need updating.

The stonechat’s apparent vulnerability to cold is in striking contrast to the story of another chat, the wheatear. In March, even before the swallows returned, a male wheatear from Africa was chacking away from its usual perch on a boulder in the field beyond my window. Oenanthe oenanthe is a regular migrant to the west of Ireland (and uplands farther inland), nesting happily in stone walls and rabbit burrows and flashing the white rump that prompted “white arse” as its Anglo-Saxon name.

However, spring wheatears spotted on a coastal shingle bank, or feeding on a headland or island, may not be breeding here but could be travelling immensely farther. They may be flying on to Canada, or even beyond, to Alaska – an incredible 14,500km from their wintering grounds south of the Sahara. The full range of the “Greenland wheatear” as this race or subspecies is generally known (leucorrhoa is sometimes tacked on to its name) is now confirmed by new tracking devices, weighing little more than a gram, fitted to birds that themselves weigh a mere 25g.

The two kinds of wheatear seem scarcely different in the field, but the long-distance migrants have pointed wings 6mm or 7mm longer, their bills are imperceptibly heavier, and the buff of the breast and the brown of the back are distinctly richer in hue. When I came across them once in northeast Greenland, they were just another delightful surprise.

On the northward migration, they often take the journey in stages, pausing to rest and feed in Ireland, Scotland and Iceland: arriving in the Arctic too early, they too might succumb to the cold. Flying back in autumn with their young, some birds use the same route, passing through Ireland mainly in September. But many use northwesterly winds to fly from Greenland to Europe in a single passage over more than 3,000km of sea.

Migration, on routes becoming longer over centuries as the last ice retreated, is a product of natural selection, and flying to “empty” regions full of insect food leads to greater breeding success. The late Peter Conder, a director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), devoted a book to the wheatear in 1989, more than 20 years ahead of today’s high-tech tracking. “I am sure,” he wrote, “that this enormous expenditure of energy . . . in order to raise five young does balance out.”

Eye on nature

On a leisurely cycle recently, a small animal I couldn’t identify darted into the ditch. It was six or eight inches long, with a slim body, mouse-brown coat, shortish face with upright ears, and short legs.

Áine Hutchinson, Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary

It was a stoat.

I saw a hooded crow grab a young rabbit after chasing it in a field, kill it by jabbing at its neck, then proceed to pluck an area around its neck and eat parts of it. Is this common?

Robert Lee, Leixlip, Co Kildare

Yes. Young rabbits are part of the diet of hooded crows.

I had just fed my dog some canned dog food. The dog finished eating and went for a roll in the grass. A female blackbird scurried up the garden and pecked at the leftover dog food in the bowl. Is this unusual?

Marian Gunning, Tralee, Co Kerry

An enterprising blackbird recognised good protein.

Why do dandelions form seed heads without going through the process of flowering?

Robert Hayes, Baltray, Co Louth

The seed heads form under the wilted flowers of the dandelion and push them off. See the video on this website: iti.ms/JJyEHF.

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