From urban foxes to suburban songbirds: Culchies and townies in the animal and bird world

We now have urban foxes, city park squirrels and suburban songbirds: some animals have made permanent moves to towns but others pick and mix their accommodation and dining locations

Home sweet home: Blue tits nesting in a traffic light pole in Monkstown, Dublin. Picture: Caoimhe Culhane

Just as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue, pants to the place from whence at first she flew — Oliver Goldsmith

‘Coillte Maghagh’, the wood of Fir Bolg chieftain Maghagh, has given its evocative deep-throated name to blow-ins living in Dublin. As a Limerick-man, I rejoice in being a ’culchie’. But is the genus limited to humans? Dublin teems not only with human culchies, but with mammal and bird ones as well.