A hen blackcap (which, actually, has a red cap) drives off all other birds and commandeers three peanut feeders and the bushes they hang on as her own. The only successful competitors are a troop of long-tailed tits, a dozen strong, that arrive a few times daily and swarm all over the feeders so that there is hardly room enough for another beak.
Not many blackcaps – greenish, robin-size warblers – are to be seen in Ireland in January and I am happy to help sustain her. Seeing her recalls the rich song of the black-capped male, with its fluted notes and melancholy endings, that I so often heard in the banana plantations in La Gomera in the Canary Islands. But she is a terrible bully. She can’t possibly consume 5% of the peanuts in the feeders, yet won’t let other birds get near them.
The story of her distinctive tribe is interesting. Most northern European blackcaps migrate to Spain and North Africa in winter, but a few have always been recorded in Ireland and southwest Britain. These were thought to be birds that had arrived in spring, nested and stayed on.
However, in the winter of 1961, a blackcap caught by a cat in Britain was found to have been ringed in Austria during the breeding season there. Studies then revealed that part of the Austrian and east German blackcap nesters was migrating into the British and Irish Isles every winter and that the numbers had greatly increased in the postwar years as increasing numbers of householders put out scraps and hung peanut feeders in their gardens. These westward migrants were opportunistic birds – a shorter journey, and easier pickings was, as out Americn friends might say, a no-brainer.! Also, their journey being shorter, they beat the African migrants home to Austria in spring and get the pick of the nest sites. The females arrive fatter and thus are capable of laying more and better-provisioned eggs. So, in some 40 years, a race of short-hop migrants, programmed to fly west rather than south, appears to have evolved. Smaller and with shorter wings than their far-flying long-haul cousins, their beaks may even have grown longer, the better formed for pecking nuts from net-wire containers. Thus, we have a peanut-feeder evolution. Man’s humanitarian gesture has engendered a new, robust subspecies of bird.
It is likely that the peanuts we put out in our gardens are grown in The Gambia in west Africa, which I visited in December, and support farmers there. Bill O’Flaherty of Cork wrote to tell me how, in 1943, as a radio officer in the British Merchant Navy, he sailed in a convoy of ships, escorted by Naval vessels, from Scotland to Dakar in Senegal and then south to Bathurst (now Banjul) in British Gambia. From there, having picked up labourers and their families who lived on deck, his ship steamed upriver for a day and moored at a jetty behind which stood a mountain of peanuts. Four gangways were put in place, with a tally clerk on each, and the labourers carried the peanuts in sacks aboard – each one duly noted and later paid for at the price of one penny per bag – and then emptied them into the hold. The ship sailed safely home to Scotland and docked at Leith where the latest suction machinery was available to discharge its cargo.
Those peanuts, I am sure, were not for the birds but, rather, to help sustain the British population through wartime shortages relieved only by the brave sailors that ran the gamut of U-boats to bring supplies from overseas.
Last week, as I drove up the bay, redshanks – waders normally seen out on the slob – were picking along the green verge of the path that runs beside the water. Happily, for days on end, Courtmacsherry Bay was bathed in winter sun with no ice along the seaside roads. Newscasters reported on the frozen world of Ireland. On this blessed Gulf Stream strip in west Cork, at times it seemed as if they were talking about a foreign land.
For the redwings, fieldfare and blackbirds that have arrived in their ten of thousands from Scandinavia and Russia, this coast must be a haven of delight. Unusually bullfinches, also, have arrived in numbers never before seen.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, January 11, 2010
