Monday, November 22, 2010
IN Galway recently, I looked out the window of a seafront apartment one morning and saw five glossy blackbirds perched on a leafless shrub.
I was struck by how shiny they were, and how slim. Another blackbird was perched on a neighbouring bush, but it was noticeably plumper and less aerodynamic. I surmised that the five were migrants that had arrived on the high winds the night before and were busily searching for a holly bush, rowan or hawthorn that would supply breakfast. They left as a flock. They didn’t stay long.
Thousands of blackbirds migrate into Ireland from western, central and northern Europe each winter. Last January, when the half-starved redwing and fieldfare thrushes arrived from Scandinavia and Russia to find Britain and then Ireland covered in snow – and died in their thousands, as a result – there were blackbirds amongst them. In our yard, feeding along with the 50 or 60 thrushes on the bread we scattered, there might have been as many as 20 blackbirds at a time.
These days, the peanut feeders are crowded with clients once again. The garden birds have come out of the bushes: a month ago, there was hardly one to be seen. They’re eating my peanuts in industrial quantities and I think it’s time I researched buying them by the half hundredweight, as does my German mushrooming man in Kerry. Clearly, Kerry cuteness – or German prudence – has rubbed off on him.
It would be an impoverished world if it were devoid of birds – or any of the flora and fauna that this fruitful planet supports.
Gulls are common – although the common gull is very much less common than the blackheaded or the herring gull – but are nevertheless wonderful to watch as they hang in the air or drift down the sky, wings spread and stiff, and not moving a feather.
In Galway, the other week, on the strand that stretches away from the city centre, my son noticed that, amongst a group of gulls pecking over the seaweed, one seemed to be in trouble of some sort. Going closer, he saw that it was frantically trying to rub something off its bill. Its companions took flight as he approached, but the distressed bird seemed unable to fly. Taking his girlfriend’s scarf, my son stepped out onto the muddy margins and threw it over the bird’s head. Nevertheless, holding it still wasn’t easy– a herring gull’s beak is capable of inflicting a nasty wound – but having succeeded, he found that the barbed end of a fishhook had somehow entered the bird’s nostril, with a wire and nylon trace still attached. It wasn’t difficult to remove it but it would have been impossible for the bird to do so.
Discarded or lost lures, still with nylon line or hooks attached, regularly entangle and cause casualties amongst seabirds. Responsible fishermen know this, but there is always the problem of a cast getting caught in kelp or snarled on the sea or riverbed, with the sole option being to cut the line.
On a stroll down my local beach in west Cork, I met a man digging for sand-eels to use as bait for bass. With a garden fork, he lifted the coarse sand where it had formed ridges at the edge of the tide. Every now and then, he came upon a five-inch long sand-eel squirming through it. It is extraordinary they way they can survive in, and move through, wet sand. Otherwise, they swim rapidly, in large schools in mid-water, their silvery finish camouflaging them so well that only their eyes betray them. Also, they have the amazing knack of simply diving, as one, into the sandy seabed and disappearing from sight.
Stocks of sand-eels, vital to the survival of commercial fish species and also seabirds, are hugely depleted as a result of harvesting for fish farms and fishmeal plants. Charles Clover, in his book The End of the Line, notes how, in Denmark, he found sand-eels being processed to extract oil to feed a power station – "The oil . . . with the added advantage that it wasn’t taxed."! "The horror! The horror!", as Kurtz, the anti-hero of The Heart of Darkness, said.
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