There is nothing in the garden to equal, just now, the beauty and grace of the blossom of the winter-flowering cherry. Say that again: there was nothing in the garden to equal, in beauty and grace, the blossom of the winter-flowering cherry. That is, until the bullfinch arrived. The most strikingly handsome of small birds, handsome to the point of vulgarity, and, above all, a despoiler. For the bullfinch, when he finds a branch with a fruit or flower-bud that he likes, simply moves along and strips it entirely. David Cabot, in his Collins's Irish Birds, calculates that a single bird "can knock off up to 45 buds per minute." And they frequently do.
He tells us that most attacks occur between February and April, when the birds' natural food (seeds) is scarcest. But here we are in December, when seeds of many kinds are available and this damned destroyer slides along the lovely straight branches of the cherry, picking, picking, picking. Brutes of birds. In the past, they have been chased off by young boys with airguns, shooting for a near-miss rather than a kill; just giving them the fright of their lives and a strong hint to move on to the neighbour's garden or orchard.
You don't see them often, but once seen, never forgotten. They mostly appear to skulk in thickets and dense vegetation; are rarely, according to Cabot, seen on the ground. The male, dandyish in a black hood and brilliant pink-red underparts. Sort of hunting pink, maybe. They can't sing properly; just make a sound which some describe as deu-deu. They are the great bane of commercial fruit growers - apple, pear, plum, gooseberry and others.
The Field Book of Country Queries advises making a spider's web of black cotton and weaving it in and around the branches of smaller trees and bushes. And, to protect apple trees, spraying the fruit buds at the unopened stage with "a repellent that does no harm to buds or birds". Lime-sulphur, it instances. But, in the middle of winter, to spray the beautiful, delicate buds of the winterflowering cherry would be counter-productive. Or damn silly.
That old ass John Ruskin, who was always giving peremptory advice as to what one should admire in art, tells us of the purposeful striving for ornamental form on the part of this bird in building its nest. He can have it.