Saturday, November 21, 2009 Previous editions
Monday, November 02, 2009
I WAS travelling in my boat on the Grand Canal recently, enjoying the wonderful autumn colours of the trees and shrubs growing along the bank.
The intense dark red of the leaves of guelder rose were particularly dramatic, only upstaged when I passed a spindle tree covered in pale pink berries.
The bird life was interesting too. I had very close views of herons, some less than 10 metres away, and I was able to study the subtle differences in plumage that distinguished the birds hatched this year from the more mature specimens.
The water-hens were not as trusting when the boat approached. They took off with hysterical splashes, flying close to the canal surface before diving headfirst into clumps of bank-side vegetation to hide from the great monster.
I saw several kingfishers and most of them were the usual bolts of electric blue whirring ahead down the canal. But on one occasion I marked closely the spot where the bird had pitched in to the bank, slowed the boat down and opened the wheelhouse window.
This one stood its ground and I spotted it again when I was a few metres away, clinging to the ochre-coloured stem of an autumn reed, just below the fluffy seed head. It stayed there as I glided past and I got a full close-up view of its glorious plumage, including those rich conker-coloured under-parts that you don’t see when kingfishers are in flight.
Then I came to one stretch of canal, a couple of kilometres long, which was full of dabchicks. There were over a dozen, some in pairs and some in small groups of three or four that I think were parents with full grown young. Dabchicks are an unusual species on the canal, they normally live on ponds or small lakes that are rich in water weeds, and I couldn’t work out what attracted them to this particular stretch.
They were all in winter plumage which is much duller than the summer variety – streaks of pale and dark brown, a bit like a female mallard, only not as dark. There were faint vertical stripes on the necks of some of them and I took these to be the last vestiges of the stripes on juvenile birds.
Dabchicks moult in the autumn and during the moult they lose the ability to fly. I think this had just happened because some of the birds tried to take off when the boat approached but none of them managed to make a proper job of it. They beat their wings very rapidly but only managed to lift a couple of centimetres, with their feet and wing tips hitting the surface, before flopping back down and disappearing under water.
The dabchick is also called the little grebe, which is a good name because it is our smallest and commonest grebe. Like all its family it’s specialised for underwater swimming, using its wings to ‘fly’ below the surface in rather the same way as a penguin. They can’t really walk and, as they demonstrated that afternoon, they’re not exactly masters of flying either.
They use their underwater abilities for catching their prey, which is mostly large water insects, along with some very small fish and things like tadpoles in season I noticed they had two different methods of diving. Sometimes they would ‘jump dive’ in the same way that some diving ducks do – a little forward jump and head first under water. Other times they just seemed to disappear vertically under water as if a giant hand had dragged them down. I found this mysterious because I couldn’t work out how they did it.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
© Examiner Publications (Cork) Limited, City Quarter, Lapps Quay, Cork. Registered in Ireland: 73385.
