Cliff-top shelter for hardy stonechats

WHAT a privilege it is to be able to walk the countryside on these dazzling mornings when the storm has passed and see fields shining in the sun, each grass blade sparkling as if it was tipped with diamonds.

You’d wonder where birds can hide though, when the winds are gusting at 130km/h. As I walk along the cliffs, a pair of stonechats pop up — and “pop up” is a fairly accurate description — to watch me pass. They are attractive little birds; male and female both have russet breasts while the male has a black head and a striking white collar.

Where they are present, it’s hard to miss them because they have the habit of flying to the highest briar tip or fence post to watch as one walks past.

The male is more forward than the female. They are always seen in pairs, always in their specific home territory, isolated from others.

The pair on the cliff path occupy a ditch of wind-sculpted furze, blackthorn and rushes over a rocky cove that takes the full force of the south-westerlies. Their territory is about a quarter of an acre. It’s where they spend their lives. When the wind is howling, the rain lashing and the sea booming, you’d wonder where they find shelter.

Walking along the bay, I’m on the lookout for great northern divers or red throated divers that roam the open seas between here and Canada, coming ashore only to breed. Every winter, they turn up in bays along the Irish coast around this time. It may not be a cormorant or shag out there beyond the breakers but a diver and, if one has good binoculars, it’s worth a second look.

In early spring the cross-hatching of black and white on their backs — the breeding plumage — is beautiful to behold.

On the alder trees, siskins and goldfinches are busy feeding on the small cones. Alders provide a feast for the seed-eaters. The only deciduous trees to bear cones, they thrive on wet land and were the first trees to recolonise the drenched land thawing out after the last Ice Age, fixing nitrogen with their roots and improving it so other plants could grow. The cones float and the path of a stream on a landscape can be traced by the corridor of alders along its banks.

The siskins take only the ripest cones and move from tree to tree, cheeping and calling as if expressing excitement or enjoyment at the feast. Thompson’s Natural History of Ireland, 1849, comments on a flock: “They fed wholly on the alder and looked beautiful, hanging like little parrots, picking at the drooping seeds of that tree.”

Redwings and mistle thrushes are here too but I haven’t yet seen them in large numbers. Some years ago, driving through a leafy suburb of north London, I saw literally carpets of these Scandinavian thrushes picking and foraging as they moved in ranks across the playing fields of Highgate School.

Wild winds had raged the night before and they must have been blown in a huge flock across the North Sea and landed, ravenous, in London. !There were so many, I stopped the car to look and noticed other passers-by also gazing.

Boletus mushrooms are past their season but there are wood blewits now and I’m conducting a small experiment.

Years ago, we found a wood with metres of blewits and picked half a basket. The following year, they were scarce and have never been in the same abundance since. This year, I’ve found them in five other locations, eight or 10 in each. Instead of picking half, I’ve counted them, made a note and left them all. I’m hoping there’ll be a crop worth picking in 2008.