BECAUSE of the increasing emphasis on the importance of bio-diversity in our countryside, a lot of attention is paid to species that are endangered.
But we should not forget that, as some species diminish or even disappear, others arrive to take their place.
I will always remember the excitement of the day, some time in the early ’90s, when I drove over the bridge across the River Blackwater outside Youghal and spotted a pair of little egrets on the mud flats. I nearly crashed the car because I knew what these little white herons were — I’d watched them before in North Africa — but they were virtually unknown in Ireland at the time. Now they are a relatively common breeding bird.
A couple of decades earlier, spotting a pair of collared doves would have caused the same sort of excitement, but last weekend I visited a friend in Dublin and the doves in her garden scarcely caused a comment among us.
Go back a couple of centuries and the sight of a magpie would have got the twitchers twitching. The first small flock of these birds is supposed to have arrived in Wexford in 1676. The first record for Dublin is 1852. Now there are estimated to be 320,000 breeding pairs in the country.
Magpies seem to have decreased in numbers in my part of the midlands recently. I haven’t seen or heard one in my garden for a couple of years. I’ve had the occasional visit from a collared dove, but these birds seem to have slightly urban leanings and I see them more regularly on the main street of our local village.
The most recent newcomers to the garden are siskins. In the past, I had spotted them occasionally in the locality. This was always in winter and they were always in large mixed flocks of other finches, particularly linnets and redpolls. But I keep a separate list (now a mental list, because I’ve lost the written one) of birds I’ve seen actually on or over my own property.
The siskin is the most recent addition to this list, dating from about six months ago, when one male visited the seed feeder on my bird table.
I was delighted because they’re a very pretty little finch, particularly the males with their showy yellow plumage and the black caps on their heads. They’re also acrobatic and, for some reason, seem to prefer hanging upside down when they’re feeding. I thought the bird was an isolated vagrant forced by hard weather to follow the goldfinches to the bird table. But he brought his mate and a couple of friends and kept feeding and the other day some juvenile siskins turned up, so they must have bred close by.
In fact, identifying the species coming to the bird table is quite difficult at present because there are so many juveniles and they tend to look rather like each other and different to their parents.
My experiences watching siskins in Co Kildare fit in with the national pattern. They were once purely winter visitors and quite uncommon in most winters. They started breeding in Ireland quite recently, but have been increasing in numbers very rapidly, the last census giving an estimate of 60,000 breeding pairs. The fastest increase has been in coastal counties, particularly in the west, and it may be connected with an increase in forestry plantations.
My part of the midlands is supposed to be outside their breeding range, but it looks as if that statistic may be a bit out of date.
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, June 23, 2008
