LAST week, as we daily – and sometimes hourly – watched the nest perched high on the bare branch of a beech tree opposite the kitchen window, we saw the small heads, that shot up like jack-in-the-boxes, grow more mistle thrush-like every day.
The kitchen is on the first floor: ours is an upside-down house, so, although the nest that looks like a hay-sop is 30 feet above the ground, we can get a good view. I have set up the telescope inside a French window. It is easy, when passing, to take a quick look. Almost always, one or other parent is dutifully attending to the brood. The mother has reduced her sitting hours and now helps the cock with the running buffet.
At night, she sits on the chicks, although the two of them are foraging until it is almost dark. Just as well she sits on them, because the nest is on an exposed limb on a still-leafless tree. When it rains, it would become a mini-swimming pool, the interior being made of grass cemented with mud, and impermeable.
Such, at least, is my memory of mistle-thrush nests when I risked life and limb at dizzy heights to view them as a boy. And, I’m afraid, I sometimes took an egg or two as souvenirs for my collection. Egg-collecting in the Age of Innocence. How dastardly such thievery seems now.!
Mistle thrushes are fine birds, the largest of our thrushes, although not the most melodious. Song thrushes and blackbirds far outclass them in song. But it is the mistle thrush – ‘The Stormcock’ – that one will hear on wild January days, carolling after its fashion from the swaying topmost branches of tall trees. When song thrush and blackbird seeks shelter, the stormcock is abroad, calling for a mate, for they mate early, and often have eggs in the nest by February.
They are tough birds, too. One day, last week, we were alarmed to see a raiding party of jackdaws arrive, perhaps 10 of them, dark shapes suddenly flitting through the trees, steadily working their way closer to the nest. Cunning as only crows can be, one would lure the cock into a chase while its partners-in-crime would glide silently closer in the shadows. Meanwhile, the hen sat firm on the nest. When a raider came close, the cock, summoned by her alarm note, would quickly be there to fly at the intruder like a demon – and then turn in mid-flight to dive-bomb another that had inched nearer while he was preoccupied.
The mistle thrushes won the day. The jackdaws left, defeated. The chicks would no doubt have made a fine snack, fed as they are, every 15 minutes, 14 hours a day, on beaks full of fat, wriggling worms. When the parents arrive, the scrawny necks shoot up with yellow gapes wide open to gobble down the offerings. Two weeks ago they were weak, pink things, now they have the brown heads and characteristic profile of their parents, albeit with fluffy wigs on top.
Mistle thrushes are so called because of their taste for mistletoe, of which we have none in Ireland – apart from, apparently, a small infestation in County Down (for mistletoe, for all its romantic connections is semi-parasitic, finding a host on apple trees or limes). So, there will be little kissing under the mistletoe in Ireland and the thrush named for it must make do with yew or hawthorn berries instead. After breeding, they disperse from the trees and take to open country. They are a familiar sight on the fields in winter, standing upright and alert, listening for the movement of invertebrates in the grass. Before 1800, there were no mistle thrushes here. Then, they colonised from Britain and soon spread everywhere on this island.
Five minutes walk from my house, even higher in the trees, are two grey herons’ nests, large, untidy platforms of sticks precariously perched on the topmost branches. Through binoculars, one can see the parent birds standing guard: they appear to take turns and, now and then, utter harsh ‘kronk’ sounds, as if they are disgruntled.
Not even in my derring-do boyhood did I ever climb after a heron’s egg – although once, a pal and I found a nest in a reedbed alongside Lough Carra in Mayo. However, the eggs were hatched and the well-fledged young hissed and jabbed at us with stabbing beaks.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, May 03, 2010
