Long-tailed tit a rare treat at feeder
A friend had a female sparrowhawk staking out his peanut feeders, and, although it was, of course, feeding on the clients, it was hard not to want to keep it around; it was so beautiful and dramatic as it came banking and twisting through the trees, visiting Armageddon on its prey as surely as a Scud missile.
But back to the long-tailed tits. They are common throughout Ireland, but rarely seen except by country walkers, and then often, as they swoop from tree to tree down a leafy lane. Even without the leaves, in winter, they are hard to see, acrobatically climbing the branches or suspended from twigs, the soft, downy body as round as a golf ball and not much bigger, like a bauble or a powder puff, with a tail one-and-a-half times as long. But for the black marking on the head and the long dark tail, the whole bird is ‘soft-focus’, a ball of down, like its nest.
Most magical about the long-tailed tit is its feather-light nest, built in the tree fork anywhere from five to 50 feet above the ground, like a soft sock woven from lichen and animal hair, domed, with a small entrance hole near the top.
‘Bottle-tits,’ they’re sometimes called; as they build, they work from the inside. When the soft frame is knitted, they add a lining of 2,000 feathers and then camouflage the outside with spider webs.
I still remember the sense of having done something very wrong when, as a child, I poked my fingers into the entrance of such a nest, a soft ball of moss and gossamer, and felt tiny eggs break beneath my finger tips. That the memory is true is evidenced by the fact that since I was a child, I haven’t seen a long-tailed tit’s nest and yet I remembered that the eggs were white with pink freckles. I’ve confirmed this from a book.
We collected birds’ eggs back then and there were many such casualties in the taking, or in piercing the ends with a pin and blowing out the albumen and yoke, or in taking eggs where the chicks was already forming and so they couldn’t be blown. What environmental vandals we were, and yet, at the time, nobody, even my father who was a lover of nature, gainsaid us.
Indeed, my father made me a glass-fronted display case and, years later, one of my sons, even then a far-better informed birder than I could ever be, found it in the attic and took the eggs to the University of Cardiff where the density or thickness of the shells were of interest because they pre-dated DDT.
DDT, the deadliest of all pesticides, killed insects and the birds that fed on them, and the birds that fed on those birds. The shells of hawks’ and owls’ eggs became thinner, so that they broke beneath the breasts of the birds hatching them, and generations were lost. Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring, published in 1962, was a milestone work in nature conservation, damning DDT, despite the howls and lobbying of the chemical companies,while devastating the land.
From one of the smallest birds in Ireland, to the largest.
Last week, in Dublin, we visited the enchanting (no other word will do) WB Yeats exhibition at the National Library. In an annex, where a 12-year-old sat oblivious, head down over his mobile phone, Yeats poems were projected onto a big screen and read by famous persons, while relevant places and images were projected alongside.
For The Wild Swans at Coole, we had pictures of mute swans, which for all their gorgeous beauty were not Yeats’ nine-and-fifty swans at all, these being whooper swans, on autumn migration, “…wheeling in great broken rings, Upon their clamorous wings …”
Tut, tut, NL! Great Yeats, pity about the ornithology.
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