Cormac MacConnell: How your haircut can save the fledglings
I am especially fond of Donal Hickey’s views, and never miss them.
All of the experts are deeply concerned about modern pressures on both fronts, and their advices should always be heeded by all.
At the same time, with all due modesty, in an act triggered by the memory of an old Ulster pishogue followed by my father Sandy long ago, I reckon that I did more than any of them last week, in a very practical way, to protect and even expand the integrity of the beautiful dawn chorus, around my new home in Killaloe.
What happened was that I was enjoying all the colourful frenzy around a neighbour’s bird table, when I remembered Sandy’s old pishogue, for the first time in many years.
What followed was dictated by the beauty of the little tits and finches and dunnocks and sparrows around the bird table, most of them already in the mating mode, coupled with something I read recently... maybe by Donal Hickey... about the full impact on the populations of our smaller birds of the arrival in most areas any morning now of Madam Cuckoo and her mate.
Most of us think that the lady lays only one egg in the nest of one little local bird, and that is it.
The facts, according to the article, are that the cuckoo will lay up to a dozen eggs in the local nests, with the well-documented aftermath of the cuckoo chick taking over the nest totally, ejecting either the eggs or the fellow fledglings of the native species, and exhausting the parents of the nest with an insatiable appetite all through the summer. That, apparently, is the pure truth.
So, when I remembered the old pishogue, I left the house at once, and walked up the town to a hairdressing salon called Strands.
Glance at the illustration above, and ye will see that I seldom visit a barber or hairdresser nowadays.
But in I went, anyway, the only man at the time in a female salon, and when I eventually reached the chair, I asked the lovely lady with the shears and scissors to cut my locks off down to the scalp, and, as a favour, to place them in a bag for me to bring home, as part of an old family ritual.
We had great craic during this exercise, and I was back home in a short time with a significant plastic bag of snow-white clippings, and an extremely cold head, which was missing its normal thatched roof.
We had a live little Christmas tree last year, which we planted in the garden in January.
Following Sandy’s pishogue to the letter, I entwined my lost locks in the branches, and then covered my chilled head with a fisherman’s cap, as I went back within, to watch all the courting activity around the bird table next door.
In the faraway treetops, the first rook nests were already being constructed, and that is always a sign that Madam Cuckoo and the swallows will be arriving soon.
In the morning, there was not one silvery strand of hair remaining in the branches of the tree, and I was absolutely delighted, even though my head was still feeling naked and chilled. I even made myself a unique hot punch of celebration.
You see, Sandy and his Erne-side generation of oldsters and folklorists of that era believed that if you leave out the proceeds of your haircut for the little birds in the nesting season, they will take them away, and line their nests with them.
And the cuckoo, they believed firmly, will never, ever, approach a nest which has been lined with even one strand of hair from a human head.
I believe that myself.
Accordingly, later this year, when I hear a redoubled dawn chorus of the little ones from the back garden, I will feel proudly responsible for having directly preserved the core of it. And by then, my hair will have grown back again.
And that, once more, is a pure truth of nature.
