What Seamus the goose tells us about ash

ANOTHER LIFE:THERE ARE times when one could wish to read the mind of a goose.

Take Seamus, for example, a glossy gander of the barnacle tribe, black-white-and-silvery- grey and one of the 2,500 that winter on the Inishkea Islands, off north-west Mayo.

Back at the start of April, pecking away at clover stems on the lee slope of the islands, he suddenly found himself sprawled beneath a great net, expertly cannon-fired over the head of the grazing flock. Duly ringed, weighed, and found fit and strong, he was fitted with a harness of waterproofed knicker elastic holding a little 30-gram transmitter on his back. As Seamus, he would join two other ganders, Liam and Cormac, in reporting height, speed and location as they returned to their Arctic breeding grounds.

Satellite telemetry is all the rage these days (if still a costly one) in tracking the migrant journeys of everything from geese and swans to turtles, sharks and whales. And in Seamus’s case, it showed some fascinating behaviour.

He took off from Inishkea (in company, no doubt, with many other, untelemetered companions) on April 15th, the day after the ash cloud from the Iceland volcano prompted the closure of European airspace. Iceland is the barnacles’ first spring destination, there to fatten up on early meadow grass before flying on to nest on the cliffs of east Greenland.

Less than an hour out on their north-western bearing, Seamus – and, presumably, his little flock – had second thoughts, and turning, flew back to the Inishkeas. Next day, he took off again, but on a very different bearing – one that took him north-east, to the Scottish island of Islay.

Never before have the Irish birds been known to take such a detour.

After a few days, on April 21st, Seamus was off again, flying low over the sea to the Hebrides and then on towards Iceland, reaching 100kph at about 150m above the open ocean. As he neared the coast, he suddenly slowed and soared, to 576m. That’s nothing remarkable in itself –­ there are geese that fly over the Himalayas with hundreds of metres to spare –­ but one would love to know the reason for Seamus’s sudden elevation. So would Dr David Cabot, the barnacles’ chronicler and minder all these years. “Perhaps,” he thought, as the reading came up on his laptop at his Mayo home, “they just went up for a better look at the volcano.” It’s too early to say how the ash-cloud has affected the millions of migratory birds returning to Iceland from these islands and western Europe. A YouTube video clip shows a distant skein of geese flying high and very near the ash, if not actually straight into it (or is it a V-shaped UFO, as some would prefer?). The Iceland Review has had farmers’ tales of “the desperate sound coming the birds battling death” and falling out of the sky – which has a touch of the sagas about it. We’ll wait and see, but the vulnerability of flying birds to airborne toxins does not augur well.

As I write, Seamus is grazing safely in a coastal valley east of Reykjavik. Of the other two geese, Liam last reported from North Uist in the Hebrides and Cormac sitting on the sea somewhere out to the west. You can follow their progress at wwt.org.uk/ research/tracking/maps.asp, sel- ecting “Greenland Barnacle Goose” at the pull-down menu.

Meanwhile, a thought-provoking paper about the feeding habits of Brent geese, pioneers of Irish telemetry on migration to and from the Canadian High Arctic, appears in the new issue of Irish Birds, research journal of BirdWatch Ireland.

Lorraine Benson studied the regular commuting of these small maritime geese from their roosting site on Bull Island in Dublin Bay to feed at 60 separate grass areas up to 15km inland. These include sports grounds, golf courses, public parks and even quite small green spaces in densely-populated areas.

The food special to the geese is zostera, the estuary eelgrass that is mostly covered at high tide. Inland feeding on “amenity” grass has followed expansion of the Brents’ Irish population (islandwide, some 37,650 birds) and has increased six-fold in the past 10 years. The geese leave the bay at dawn and return at dusk, and grass becomes their primary food from at least December to March.

Lorraine Benson thinks that ensuring enough undisturbed daytime feeding sites may become “a new conservation concern” –­ this though some birds scarcely lift their heads as people walk near or even through them. So far, despite a certain capacity for nuisance, the geese have escaped much open hostility. In the longer term, however, their notoriously rapid and prolific output of partly-digested and slimy green droppings may outstrip the goodwill of golfers in posh shoes, and young rugby players diving for the ball.

EYE ON NATURE

We have many birds, including a pair of reed buntings, at a feeding tray on top of a hedge. But the chaffinch sidles over to the tray, doesn’t feed, then flies away. He repeats this twice before he finally stays to eat. What does this behaviour mean?

Niamh Neumann, Newcastle, Co Wicklow

Because the feeding tray is exposed, and the chaffinch feeds mainly on the ground, your bird makes sure that there are no predators around.

From the hedge came a series of agonised whistles and screams, obviously a blackbird under attack, possibly by a cat. Blackbirds swooped in to see what was going on and, maybe, mob the attacker. Strangely, many little birds, such as tits and finches, flocked to the over-hanging trees to watch what was going on. When all was quiet the voyeurs departed.

Eoghan Ganly, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin

My three-year-old grandson asked the question ­ why does the mother swan not crack the eggs when she is sitting on them in the nest?

Hazel Lee, Drogheda, Co Louth

The swan sits mainly on her folded legs and the eggs do not bear the full weight of her body. The shells of birds’ eggs are also designed by nature to withstand the pressure of her body.

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