Damien Enright describes his summer garden’s residents
WE have a song thrush that sings its heart out any old time of day and always in the evenings. As I write, the mid-May weather is glorious, and it sings from a branch high up in a beech tree with the sky blue behind it and a gentle breeze stirring the new green leaves, shining and trembling in the sun.
Beneath the beeches are swathes of flowers, primroses in full bloom along the stream bank, bluebells and violets, white wild garlic in swathes, meadow buttercups and red campion, sanicle and stitchwort.
These days, there is, of course, the dawn chorus to wake one with an unscored avian cacophony, and the demented cooing of wood pigeons to keep you awake when you try to go back to sleep. During the day, robins, wrens, tits and chaffinches pipe up at odd times. But the song of the song thrush excels all others.
The thrush on the beech tree gives a sustained performance every evening from seven until half past nine. I ask myself what is his partner doing while he sings aria after aria to the sunset, trying out new warbles, throaty chuckles and thrills?
Perhaps she is lulled to sleep, feeling secure, with the warmth of the eggs deep in the down of her breast. She will know who’s singing; no other thrush in these islands has the characteristic of repeating its loud, clear phrase, twice over in each burst of song. By listening for this repetition, one can tell the song from that of a mistle thrush or blackbird. In our garden, the blackbird continues its fluting song after the thrush has finished; it’s dark before it stops.
In contrast to the song thrush’s warblings, "Yackety-yackety-yack!" goes the magpie’s machine-gun staccato, loud and clear outside the window. Magpies are no danger to us humans but for a few of months each year they do pose a threat to garden birds.
Otherwise, they are useful citizen of nature’s kingdom, feeding on insects, clearing up the road kills and deaths in the wild.
Clearly, insects and their larvae, maggots and worms, play an important part in disposing of corpses; however, scavengers from the sky are faster. We have three useful scavenging crows, the raven, the grey crow and the magpie, the latter the most numerous and widely distributed.
Magpies spends three-quarters of their lives foraging on the ground, not in trees. If we witness magpie murders in the garden, it may be partly our own fault. When gardens are neatly trimmed, the magpies can find birds’ nests easily.
It isn’t surprising that some householders are traumatised after seeing a synchronised magpie raid on a family of the friendly robins or blue tits that they’ve watched build their nest and industriously feed their offspring. Now, they suddenly hear the tommy-gun chatter of a magpie raid and the panic-stricken cries of small birds. They rush out to see pink chicks carried off like meat on butchers’ hooks, only the hooks are the shining black bills of a magpie pair, ferrying them to their young.
But the magpies kill for only a short season and largely only to feed their chicks. However, the cat stalking in the brambles kills gratuitously and as often as it can, not for food but for sport.
Its victims are not only nestlings but fledglings hiding in the undergrowth, reliant on their parents for food. For those who enjoy birds in the hedges, now is the time of year to bell the cat.
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 19, 2008
