Going bird-brained for goldfinches

Damien Enright on the charms of our winged friends

SYCAMORE leaves are lovely in the spring and summer, pastel green at first, then with long red stems, then with their winged seeds hanging like jewelry on the branches, then autumnal yellow and finally grey and damp underfoot, slippery and treacherous in wet weather, plastering the forest paths, the ugliest leaves of all.

The sycamore outside my workroom window still has some bedraggled leaves but amongst them, as I write, are perched a small charm of one of our loveliest native birds, goldfinches.

Their red foreheads and cheeks are bright as live coals, and they wear a black mask across the eyes above their beaks. Nine or 10 in number, they wait for a chance to perch on the peanut feeder and grab a few beakfuls before being displaced by one of the larger, tougher greenfinches.

As they hang acrobatically from the feeder, the black and white pattern on the wings and the bright yellow outer wing feathers are very vivid. I pick up the binoculars to get a closer look and they fly away. Until I raised the binoculars, they ignored me, sitting behind the window only 10 yards distant. They are big binoculars, these ones, with large lens. Perhaps they spotted the two giant eyes and decided the creature staring at them was dangerous. I’m sorry I disturbed them now.

Also, I think it’s time I hung out a second peanut feeder as only one goldfinch can feed at a time, and I’d love to make these gorgeous birds regular garden visitors.

After they leave, a blue tit and a cock chaffinch, both colourful birds in their own right, take over.

They don’t seem in the least scared by my scrutiny. Perhaps goldfinches feel more threatened.

While I was young, they were regularly trapped for use as cage birds because they look lovely, sing well and can be cross- bred with canaries. Goldfinch mules and linnet mules were wild bird- canary hybrids.

As a boy, I used to visit a cobbler’s shop in our small Tipperary town, where the cobbler, a bird fancier extraordinaire, sat in a semi-darkness tapping away at a last amongst a hundred twittering birds.

He had, I’m afraid, thrushes, blackbirds, greenfinches, bullfinches, goldfinches, linnets and linnet mules, even robins.

When darkness fell, he would light an oil lamp and continue working. His skin was the colour of wax-end and tanned leather, and it shone. He had bright black eyes, a thin, dark face and a sharp nose — he looked like a bird. He loved birds and would talk about them for hours. We listened, in silence.

The scene might have been painted by a Dutch master, the soft-lit circle of boys around the old, shiny cobbler, birds in cages in the penumbra, further and further back.

My father, who’d been brought up in the countryside, showed me how to make a bird trap like the ones he’d learned to make as a boy.

It was shaped like a pyramid and made entirely of sally rods, without a screw or nail. It was baited with bread and had an interior perch of springy osier. The moment a bird stood on it, down came the pyramid cage and trapped it inside.

Happily, if we caught birds at all — impatience generally made our efforts futile — we released them.

While we listened to the lore of the cobbler we saw, even as children, that it was a crime to imprison a bedraggled, terrified wild bird. In our innocence we could see, even then, that “A robin redbreast in a cage/ Puts all Heaven in a rage”, as William Blake, the great English poet, had written.

A lady from Blarney reported that she’d seen egrets fishing on the river running through the Woolen Mills car park in Blarney, Co Cork, and was surprised that, having first nested in Ireland, at Youghal, just 10 years ago, they had already dispersed so far.

I’d be interested to know if they’ve nested on any inland waters. They often nest in the tree tops, near herons.