The birds and the birds

DUSK in mid May can be rather too chilly for taking one's seafood special outside at Moran's of the Weir. But the flotilla of swans on the Kilcolgan estuary still added a lot to the evening, rippling the golden afterglow with tiger stripes of darkness. Nine and fifty of them, possibly, like Yeats's count of wild whooper swans at Coole, just down the road - but these were young Irish mute swans, well on their way to being tame.

Earlier in the day, rounding a bend beside Galway harbour, we had glimpsed a big flock of swans crowding to the shore to be fed by benevolent locals. Between 200 and 300 birds gather there in spring and early summer. In some of the bays of the Connemara coast there are flocks of 100 or more, even where nobody feeds them.

These are all non breeding swans, mainly juvenile, aged between one and four. From the moment they leave their parents they hang around in flocks, sometimes flirting with the opposite sex even before their dark infant plumage has faded. But most serious courtships don't start until they are three or four years old and there's quite a lot of "playing the field" before pairs are fully bonded.

Breeding demands a territory, and the pair usually start by going back to the female's natal neighbourhood. They may have to spend a whole summer fighting with resident swans to carve out and hold a space, without actually getting to breed until the following year.

Richard Collins, in his long term study of Dublin's swans, found that less than half the city's swans manage to breed by five years old. Good nest sites are at a premium, so that some young pairs are pushed out to inadequate territories on estuaries. Around Cork city, too, a lot of the nests are in estuaries and breeding attempts often fail.

This urban "housing shortage" may give young swans a harder time in getting settled, but it does say something good about humans. City people are fond of swans and take an interest in them, so that pairs tend to nest in the same spot year after year, without much fear of vandalism.

Around Dublin, the number of non breeding swans seems to have increased since the 1970s, and in spring they are often chivied away by resident pairs who want their territories to themselves. This adds to the movement between city flocks, and boosts the big, permanent herd of swans at the Broad meadow estuary, near Swords.

Here at Thallabawn, wintering teenage swans are harassed away from the lakes along the shore, leaving one breeding pair in serene occupation of each. I had an anguished call from a friend further up the coast who saw a young cob wounded and hobbling towards the sea from the lake at Emlagh.

As summer wears on, we meet little flocks of bachelor waders on the beaches and rocks, a reminder that many other species, too, must serve out a substantial, unmated adolescence - most oystercatchers, for example, are four before they breed.

Garden songbirds, on the other hand, have much shorter lives and males start competing for mates within a year of birth. Without them being gathered into obvious bachelor flocks, it can be hard to appreciate just how many young cock birds are left lurking hopefully along the hedges - "floating", as ornithologists put it.

The blackbird, for example, has no hope of obtaining a mate unless he has established a territory. Some young birds manage to find, a vacancy left by a death, or elbow into a new territory between established ones. But others are left hanging around, skirmishing with the resident birds and hoping for some sort of opening as the breeding season progresses.

There have been experiments to find out how long it takes for vacant territories to be re occupied. Birds on one farm were caught by mist netting and them released. It was estimated that there were 12 blackbird territories, but along with 12 hens there were 17 cocks!

In another study, a researcher removed the resident great tits from a wood. New pairs appeared within hours, some from territories outside the wood and others as non territorial "floaters". They seemed to have been monitoring the wood - perhaps by listening to the songs of individual residents.

The number of young songbirds settling in any one wood or garden each spring has a lot to do with the size and survival of the previous year's population. Last year's exceptional summer must have produced record broods of young birds, and it provided plenty of food late into autumn.

But the hard winter in many places will have thinned numbers, out again, and a cold spring will have favoured older, well bonded birds who know their way around the insect supply in their territory. Not, after all, the best of times in which to be young, male and floating.

LATEST in this year's crop of pocket books for hardy hikers is the Walk Guide, To The East Of Ireland in the series edited by Joss Lynam (Gill & Macmillan, £7.00). This is a revised edition of the 1991 paperback, and David Herman and Miriam Joyce McCarthy have walked all the routes again - a necessary up dating in territory given to sudden complications of forestry plantations and farm access.

The guide covers a great variety of hill walks, from Howth Head and Wicklow to the mountains and river valleys of the south east. These are landscapes full of strongly local character and surprisingly dramatic views from the summits.

David Herman apologises for "tedious" text (it never is) to guide walkers through mazes of forestry. His cautions can be memorable: "On no account follow the lower track through the wall; it will lead you to an uncertain welcome in a farmyard, and worse, a knee deep lake of liquid cow dung." Ms McCarthy's territory, chiefly the mountains of the south east, seems rather more generous with its paths and resting places.