The weeping beech that walks through gardens

A tree can take a few years to show you the shape it means to be. Ten years ago, wandering through the old demesne forest at Cong, we found a drift of self-sown beech seedlings, a few inches high, and brought one home to the garden. A slow ascension in a sheltered corner brought its head up into the wind, green as a lettuce in May, a fiery auburn when the winter sun shines through it.

Suddenly, this summer, at around 2.5 metres tall, its new growth has sprung a surprise. Instead of reaching for the sky, its slender twigs arch gracefully earthwards, swirling in the sea breeze like a leafy crinoline. Rather than the common Fagus sylvatica, we seem to have adopted F.s.pendula, the weeping beech.

This, books tell us, is the largest-growing of all hardy weeping trees, reaching its 25 metres or so (not on this hillside, it won't) long after a weeping willow has grown up and decayed. At Florencecourt, in Co Fermanagh, there are "immense, round-topped specimens", and half a dozen other Irish demesnes in the midlands count weeping beeches among their prized trees. In England's Kew Gardens, moreover, there is a remarkable walking beech, which is advancing outwards because its branches have rooted down and become a ring of young trees where they struck the ground. Already preparing to fell half a fuchsia hedge, move the garden tap and take the long way round with the wheelbarrow, we are unabashed at having planted the ultimate tree-in-the-wrong-place. May it walk itself into a forest.

Meanwhile, the surge of growth in all the acre's young trees enfolds us in waves of wind-tossed green, closing out until the autumn large chunks of our exhilarating vista of seashore and mountain. For the moment, we exchange some rather good views for a bower of little birds.

This year, for some mysterious and merciful reason, their chief tormentors seem to have kept their distance: magpies are nowhere in evidence. Could it be that sheer density of foliage has frustrated their early-morning raids? Or has it merely muffled that awful rattling that accompanies the sacking of a nest? For years, I pursued a running battle with magpies. During my beachcombing, I had retrieved a long bamboo pole with a sharp hook at the end (made, I suspect, for the illegal gaffing of salmon). It served, year after year, to pull the magpies' nest apart as fast as they could build it in the spruce tree at the gate. Eventually the pole broke; eventually, too, I came to accept the magpies' natural role. Their toll of eggs and nestlings to feed their own young for a month in spring is part of the elaborate balance of odds in the season╣s accounting.

Most songbirds can manage two or even three clutches of eggs - perhaps 10 nestlings - way beyond the needs of population replacement.

The extraordinary rise in magpie numbers of the closing decades of the century seems now to have stabilised in Britain and may also have done so here, but we are still left with some 320,000 breeding birds. The increase has been almost entirely engendered by human activity: the spread of leafy suburbs, the prolific waste of food, the road kills that feed the magpies through the winter.

Their habit of hoarding food - stolen, quite often, from bird-tables - helps them make the most of every opportunity.

If the number of magpies in the suburbs is artificial, so is that of songbirds, in so far as these, too, are supported by bird-table food. This supply is rarely matched, unfortunately, by thick hedges and other cover in which small birds can nest with a fair chance of safety.

Considering that we exert such a strong influence on the lives of both predator and prey, human shock-horror reaction to magpies behaving naturally becomes a little specious. Birds do not exist for our pleasure, however keen this may be.

Last month, an e-mail contributor to natureireland@yahoogroups.com - an often mercurial forum - reported on his use of a Larsson cage-trap to catch five magpies in as many days. He suggested a "Larsson trap community" to exchange ideas for doing even better.

Along with a fierce reproach for acting like a gamekeeper came a knowledgeable intervention from the British ornithologist, Chris Mead (author of the recent The State of the Nation's Birds). He agreed that Larsson traps can catch a lot of magpies - but, in a good magpie habitat, this just brings more and more in.

"One correspondent of mine," he wrote, "catches a thousand a year in a wide area and this represents about 5 per cent of the local production of magpies."

A more effective, if effortful, way of reducing magpie damage is to climb to their nest and kill the eggs (what with - a hat-pin? horrid!) so that the birds go on sitting, and never have young to feed. Much better, says Mead, is to improve the cover for songbirds and thus the odds on their survival. By far the most touching response to the Larsson trap enthusiast came from a correspondent who had had his own trapping successes in the previous week - but of a rather different kind.

"I too have managed to make five catches - two adult and three juvenile rats," he wrote. "All were healthy, clean-looking animals. All were given a good feed of cheese and grain before being driven 15 miles away and released in a hedge leading to a woodland, well away from human habitation.

"As I write, a friend of theirs is helping herself to the peanuts on the bird-table. She will, however, be joining her pals in the not too distant future.

"It was fascinating to watch her yesterday evening as she gathered mouthful after mouthful of leaves and grass to line her nest in the stone wall which surrounds my garden. If it were not for the disease element, they'd be welcome to stay, but killing them is out of the question. They were here before I was.