Monday, March 01, 2010
THE cold weather came back last week but I was a bit better prepared for it this time.
I wrote [January 11] about how the last cold snap, which started in December, had presented me with a problem about breaking the ice on my fish pond without causing damage or stress to the fish. Afterwards several readers kindly emailed me with the correct solution to the problem.
What you do is boil up a large kettle or saucepan of water, place it on the ice and wait until it melts a circular hole. You them remove it and float something like a light rubber ball in the water – the idea is that the ball drifts around in the breeze and keeps the hole ice free.
Fish can actually survive for quite a long time under ice but eventually in a small pond the levels of dissolved oxygen will drop and they will start to asphyxiate. It’s also impossible to feed them when the pond is completely iced over – though their need for food drops with the temperature.
Breaking the ice with a blunt instrument is not a good idea because it can cause underwater shock waves that can hurt the fish. And pouring the hot water directly into the pond could cause them thermal shock – particularly in a small pond like mine.
I also wrote about how the cold weather in January had driven a pair of long-tailed tits to join the queues of other birds at the feeders on my bird table. The good news is that they’re still regular visitors, five or six weeks later. I’ve seen two of them feeding at the same time so I know that there are at least this many, but there may be more.
I remember a piece of research done many years ago in Britain where a man was convinced that he had a single blue tit that was a regular visitor to his bird table. A professional ornithologist came along to do some research and he marked the bird (I forget what kind of marker he used). It turned out that 48 different individual blue tits visited the bird table on one winter’s day. So I may have more than a pair of long-tailed tits. I was reading up on long-tailed tits the other day and I came across a list of English dialect names for them. Apparently in parts of England they are (or were) called by the delightful name of "bumbarrels". It took my sluggish brain a while to appreciate how appropriate this name is. I had to stop thinking of large wooden casks and think instead of an old-fashioned double-barrelled shotgun.
Many of the old names for birds are being lost in these days of standardised field guides and some of them were very descriptive. "Windhover" is an excellent name for a kestrel and anyone who has ever heard the eerie drumming of a snipe in spring will understand why it should be called a "goat bird".
The return of the arctic air masses at the end of the winter has had a sombre effect on the countryside, at least in the part of the midlands where I live. With the exception of the clamouring flocks at the bird feeders, everything is very quiet. Many of the winter migrant birds – the redwings and fieldfares in the fields, the woodcock in the woods and the snipe on the bog – seem to have moved. They’ve probably headed for Kerry, or maybe even further afield, to escape the grip of the frost.
Even resident birds like rooks, jackdaws and wood pigeons seem to be about in smaller numbers. Hopefully, many have found some niche where they can find food but undoubtedly some will not survive.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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