Tits aplenty to be seen in my garden

Damien Enright marvels at this year’s fledglings.

HOW many birds nested on our patch? What has our overgrown wilderness contributed to the commonwealth of birds, this spring and summer of 2006? How many young did the winter residents, their diet supplemented with crumbs, spaghetti, basmati rice, peanuts and plum pudding laced with brandy, produce?

How can we know? My days of scrambling through briar patches and scaling trees and ivied walls in search of nests are over. But I can make a rough estimate by counting the yellow-gaped young being fed by their parents on the lawn.

We have juvenile robins, song thrushes and blackbirds in ones, twos or threes, and a family of at least seven great tits. I’ve observed that the latter never gather around the bird table until after 6pm.

Why this schedule, I don’t know. The young show no fear whatever about entering the jackdaw-proof cage (only half successful) mounted on the table; neither do a couple of young robins. There, we put tiny crumbs — if they are bigger pieces, the jackdaws attack and, generally, make off with 90% of its contents in a series of co-ordinated assaults.

Adult blackbirds often feed their young in the warm evening sun on the lawn outside my work-room window. They scratch the leaves beneath the bushes and seems to find a morsel every 20 seconds. The waiting chick is bigger than the adult. Blackbird parents divide the brood, and each looks after certain youngsters.

A cock, with his bright yellow bill, arrives with one chick. After he has scratched about, fed it and gone, a hen arrives with another offspring. Robins and thrushes also practice brood sharing. It may be two weeks after they leave the nest before the juveniles of these species can cope alone; meanwhile, they follow their parent around and learn how and where to find food.

It’s a learning curve. In some species, the male takes all the responsibility, so that the female can fatten herself up and form new eggs for a new brood. Even when fledglings seem lost, the parents are usually nearby. Humans should not interfere.

Blackbirds are one of the species that may nest as many as three times, laying larger clutches as summer progresses and there’s more food. Tits raise just one family, but it is prodigious; it may number up to 14 chicks. It is timed for the hatching of caterpillars, of which there can be so many on a single tree that they would feed 10 families. The young are surrounded with food and are independent a week after leaving the nest.

Birds of prey have a long nurturing. By what means does an owl teach its chick how to hunt in the dark of night? Or a peregrine falcon teach its chick how to swoop on a victim at up to 180 mph? Or a sparrowhawk teach its young how to whip through the trees, in-out like a skier dodging poles, to arrive on an unsuspecting target?

Weeks, even months of tuition are necessary to train the young to self-sufficiency; in the case of owlets, it is three months before they are educated enough to survive alone.

Meanwhile, I’ve had some amusing tales from a Kerry reader, Aisling nic an tSithigh, who emailed me to say: “Last week, I dropped a bar of soap as I crossed my yard and a gull swooped and swallowed it.

“Later, some tourists were eating outdoors at the Tig Slea Head and a gull landed and swiped the woman’s purse from the table. She chased it to a field, but it took off again and disappeared into the distance with purse in beak.

“Maybe it was the gull that swallowed my soap, and was taking revenge on humans!”

Continuing, she says, “On a very warm day I went into the sea off the island of Inismeain and suddenly found a common seal pup rubbing against me and looking up at me with big, round eyes. When I went ashore and sat on the boulders at the water edge, it followed me, barking plaintively, and climbed onto my legs. I was afraid to move in case, out of fright, it bit me.

“Eventually I wriggled free and started to move away but it dragged herself after me. I kept telling it I wasn’t its mother, but it took me some time to steer it back into the sea. I have never been so charmed; it was really beautiful.”