Let's charm the birds

When the nut-feeder on the thorn-bush gets too crowded with sparrows and goldfinches, a box of seeds-in-goose-fat on the window-sill draws a few of the birds within gaze-swapping distance, a couple of feet from my nose. Blue-tit, robin, blackbird, one by one, tilt their round eyes to the window as I freeze above my keyboard - still for long enough, anyway, to let each of them take a few scoops of greasy seeds.

There is a protocol to looking at birds this close: or rather, not looking, since the secret with a blackbird is to pretend you don't see it, even while storing up the melting, peat-brown dark of the eye; anything more direct, and it's gone. The tit is more tolerant, or perhaps more singleminded, checking everything out in clockwork shifts of the head.

The robin alone is prepared to engage my glance, in what looks like an open-minded assessment, before remembering what it is there for. The fact that it will feed with its back turned is, I suppose, some sign of good faith. Can it really be true that Irish and British robins have a monopoly on trust in people, an adaptation responding over time to particular human cultures? In his great monograph, The Life of the Robin, David Lack described how, in most of Europe, the robin is a shy, woodland species which avoids the haunts of man, and that the British and continental robin can be told apart: the first is quite tame, the other secretive.

Centuries of being shot at must make a difference: even German and Swedish robins are hunted for food when they migrate to the Mediterranean in winter. Our own birds stay in Ireland, for the most part, but drift down from higher ground when the cold bites.

A Wexford family once had a robin as a guest for a week in a frosty December: it joined the family sitting round the fire and in the dining-room, eating crumbs off the table or perching on the books they were reading, and roosted each night on a picture frame near the fireplace.

Watching Eamon de Buitlear on RTE the other night, with a robin feeding on his outstretched palm, I was frankly jealous, since all that has stood between me and this undoubted pleasure is simple lack of application. Exactly how to achieve it was spelled out 70 years ago by Lord Grey of Fallodon, whose book, The Charm of Birds, ran through 10 editions in a decade.

"Any male robin can be tamed," he insisted. The bird is first attracted by crumbs of bread thrown on the ground; then a mealworm is thrown to it; then a box - such as one of the small metal boxes in which chemists sell lozenges - is placed open on the ground with mealworms in it.

When the bird has become used to this, the next step is to kneel down and place the back of one hand flat upon the ground with the box open on the upturned palm, and the fingers projecting beyond the box. This is the most difficult stage, but robins will risk their lives for mealworms and will soon face the fingers and stand on them.

The final stage, that of getting the bird to come on to the hand when raised above the ground, is easy. The whole process may be a matter of only two or three days in hard weather, when the birds are hungry; and once it has been accomplished, the robin does not lose its tameness: confidence has been established and it does not diminish when weather becomes mild and food plentiful. Fine, but where do the mealworms come from? They are not, as you might fear, the wriggly blowfly maggots anglers use, but the caterpillar-like larvae, up to three centimetres long, of the yellow mealworm beetle, Tenebrio molitor, which lives a healthy vegetarian life in flour and other stored cereals.

A couple of hundred mealworms, bought from a petshop specialising in bird-food, can be used as the nucleus for a continuous supply. In his Bird Table Book, Tony Soper explains how to make a sort of moist kitchen compost of bran, fruit and vegetable peelings in an old biscuit tin with a wire-mesh lid, seeding it with the mealworms and keeping it in the airing cupboard. There's a whole cycle after that - mealworm into pupae which become beetles that lay eggs which hatch into mealworms - so this might need to be a family decision.

`Though so tame in taking food," warns Lack, "the robin will not make a pet. Trusting it often becomes, but friendly, never." It's not in their nature to be social outside the breeding season, so a robin will not follow its human owner about in the way that a pet raven would. Indeed, watching the robins as they come and go to nut-feeder and seed-box, their solitariness and constant territorial aggression towards their own kind is often on display, even between birds one might take to be mates.

Telling cock from hen is impossible from mere appearance: both get into fights. Even when birds are ringed, the ringer has to wait for spring behaviour (the cock feeding the hen, for example) to be absolutely sure which is which. Everywhere in these islands the robin has been studied, the resident winter population consists mainly of males. Most of the females simply vanish after breeding and reappear in the spring, while the males stay on to defend their territory.

The difficulty in Ireland is knowing where the seasons are. Autumn certainly lasts into December, spring is inching backwards to meet it. Only January convinces, in most years, as a thoroughly wintry month. What, then, of the pair of house-sparrows, copulating busily right outside the window on January 30th? It was a mild day, to be sure, with the song-thrush in full territorial voice. House-sparrow pairs are faithful for life: perhaps, like people, they just suddenly felt like it.

Michael Viney can be contacted at viney@anu.ie