Monday, June 01, 2009
A FEW weeks ago a pair of blackbirds built a nest in the hedge outside my conservatory.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the conservatory – partly because I’ve some extra work to do and partly because it’s been too wet to go outside – and so I’ve been able to watch the birds caring for their young.
I couldn’t actually see the nest because the hedge is very dense and I didn’t go looking in case I disturbed the birds. But they always used the same hole in the hedge to fly in and out and it was less than two metres from where I sat reading and writing.
It’s easy to tell the sexes apart in blackbirds, one being black and the other being brown, and they divided the work of feeding their young equally between them. And it’s astonishing how hard they worked.
One or other of them would fly in every three or four minutes with something, a worm or a grub, in its beak. It only spent a few seconds feeding the brood, then it whirred off again. There was a sort of frenzy about the activity of these normally fairly laid-back birds.
This went on without a pause from dawn until dusk. In fact, on some evenings I heard the whirring of their wings as they entered the hole in the hedge after it had become too dark to actually see the birds. It’s difficult to work out how the parents found the time to feed themselves.
Apart from that sound of whirring wings, the whole feeding process was completely silent. Neither the parents or the chicks made any noise. This is in stark contrast to the starlings which are nesting beside them, behind the fascia board of the house.
It’s harder to tell the sexes apart in starlings, though the male is shinier than the female. But again both parents seem to share the job of feeding the chicks. When one arrives with food it first perches on the gutter or the branch of a nearby tree and emits a loud, screeching babble of calls. This triggers every chick in the nest to respond with an even louder cacophony.
Then the parent enters the hole in my rotting fascia board and it sounds as though a massive free-for-all takes place. There’s lots of screaming and banging of wings against the inside of the fascia. It appears as though the young birds are actually fighting with each other to get the food. Perhaps this is the reason that the parent starlings spend longer at the nest than the blackbirds.
Certainly the starlings are not such good neighbours as the blackbirds. Apart from all the noise, which is nearly as bad when you’re inside the house as when you’re outside, several square metres of the patio below the nest is now painted white by their droppings.
There’s so much mess that it seems impossible that it could be created by just two relatively small birds. In fact, it probably isn’t. Parent birds of most species remove the droppings of their young from the nest so, if there are five young birds in there, then a total of seven could be contributing to the whitening of my patio.
The starlings are still there but I spotted a fat, speckled blackbird chick hopping around on the ground outside the conservatory the other day, still being fed by its frantic parents. But now the problem I have is that every time I leave a door or window open a pair of swallows flies into the house and causes mayhem. They are taking risks, responding to the same compulsion, equally desperate to find a place to nest.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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