A READER writes to say that in Dublin a couple of climatically-disorientated street pigeons, uka (unkindly-known-as) rats-with-wings, recently decided to roost, nest and defecate on staff and visitors above the entrance of her office building.
"The activity increased in the last week and then, whoosh, came the north winds and this morning, the nest and smashed eggs were found on the ground. Meanwhile, I notice that, since their moult, mallards are engaged in courtship and mating rituals."
I wonder if other readers have observed instances of out-of-sync nesting in other species.
I think pigeons cannot rank very high in the intellectual pecking order compared with, say, magpies, jays and other crows.
The inane cooing that wood pigeons do for hours on end cannot help their brains, nor the constant bobbing of the head as they walk about. The pigeon pair reported may be either evolutionary trend-setters, sex-mad or not very smart.
A German reader wrote to say he disagreed with my comment (on November 2) that "edible forest mushrooms, and especially the classic Ceps, are rare as hen’s teeth over much of the country".
Not so in Kerry, he says, and lists 10 species of edible boletus he has encountered in woods around Kenmare.
I’ve come across all 10 in Ireland, but never in the same abundance as I’ve encountered them 20 miles from London, in Kent.
However, over four decades of forest foraging I’ve decided some species, even amongst the boletii, aren’t worthwhile.
Two weekend ago we visited the truly beautiful Fota House arboretum where trees from all corners of the world were in their autumn glory (view now while leaves last!), and I noticed many Birch Boletus (B. scaber) and a couple of Slippery Jacks (B. luteus), but neither are very good to eat — not that I would have dreamt of removing even a blade of grass from Fota!.
My German correspondent has been coming to Ireland since 1974 and is now settled in Kerry. Kerry is a seductive place, and he may be infected with the Kerry people’s conviction that the Kingdom is pre-eminent in everything, including mushrooms — and, of course, they’re right. He might also have absorbed some of the Kerry cuteness.
He says: "It is now too late in the year to show you these treasures of the Kerry woods. And — after second thoughts — I won’t show them to you next year either. Still, I am available to bring you to a few places, where you can see a restricted selection of Kerry’s Hen’s Teeth." I may take up the offer next year.
Three readers got in touch following last week’s article on rare bird arrivals to say they’d seen yellow-browed warblers in gardens at Bantry, Skibbereen and Sneem. They were cock-a-hoop about the sightings, but said that the ‘brow’ was more vivid on their birds than that of the bird pictured.
Experts tell me the migrants were young birds, while the bird pictured was an adult at the end of the breeding season, and somewhat worn out.
Mad north winds that threatened East Anglia and Holland with flooding brought thousands of little auks, pocket-size birds about the size of a starling, that spend their lives on northern oceans, hurtling down the Irish Sea.
Some years ago, a lady phoned me to say she’d found one wrecked (an ornithological term) in a car park in west Cork. I took it back to the briny.
This time, one turned up in Trinity College, Dublin. It was fed and released at Dun Laoghaire pier, where it was instantly eaten by a greater black-backed gull.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, November 19, 2007
