IT’S always a pleasure when an unusual bird turns up in your garden.
But I was very envious of a Kinsale reader who emailed me the other day. She had just spent five minutes watching a hoopoe picking at the food that she puts out for the other garden birds.
Hoopoes are rare and exotic birds, at least in this country, with their barred pink plumage, long bill and extraordinary crest. They also have a weird way of flying, more like a huge and ungainly butterfly than a bird.
Although they’re found all over Europe, Asia and Africa they only visit Ireland occasionally and accidentally. Birds in the northern part of their range migrate south for the winter, returning in March. Occasionally they overshoot, often because of a strong tailwind, and end up in Ireland. The day before the lady in Kinsale mailed me there had been a strong southerly wind.
Nearly every year two or three birds make this mistake. They usually hang around for a week or two and then disappear, presumably heading back south to look for a mate. Not unnaturally, most Irish sightings are along the south coast and they are commonest in early spring, with a sprinkling reported in the autumn. One spring my late father had a hoopoe feeding in his hen run on the Waterford coast for nearly a month.
One of the unusual things about them is that they don’t have any living relatives. There was once something called the Saint Helena giant hoopoe, but it’s now extinct. They are very distantly related to kingfishers and things called woodhoopoes, but there is basically just one kind of hoopoe in the family, though the ‘splitters’ in the world of taxonomy recognise debatable numbers of sub-species.
The name comes from its distinctive call, but it only makes this at certain times of the year and it’s almost never heard in Ireland.
They mostly eat large insects, with a small amount of vegetarian food and the odd lizard or frog. The long beak can probe into the ground in search of delicacies and it has a special arrangement of muscles so that it can be opened and closed even when it’s stuck in the ground. They nest in holes in trees, rocks or walls and both the female (the male doesn’t incubate) and the young plaster themselves with a foul-smelling substance which they secrete while they’re in the nesting hole. This is thought to deter predators.
Birds like this that only turn up here occasionally are called ‘vagrants’ by ornithologists. This is not a very flattering name for something which causes great pleasure if it turns up in your garden and great excitement if you’re a proper, competitive twitcher. Vagrants give those often nerdy individuals a chance to add something to their ‘Life List’ which other twitchers haven’t got – a source of immense satisfaction.
Many vagrants are North American species that get blown on to the west coast by strong gales. It’s harder for them to get home so they often stay around for quite a while.
This can spark off an invasion of twitchers as word gets out about the rarity. Nowadays there are websites, both regional and national, that carry information about the sighting of vagrants. Before the internet phones were used, and if you go back even further, to the early years of bird-watching in the last century, enthusiasts sent each other postcards. The post was quicker in those days.
Though hoopoes are true vagrants and definitely unusual, they are not quite rare enough to trigger an invasion of twitchers descending on Kinsale.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, March 29, 2010
