Birds and their flights of fancy

Damien Enright on how borders are non-existent for birds.

NOTHING can be finer than to sit in a sheltered Irish garden in the first days of warm sun, surrounded with green buds and singing birds. It was possible to do this last week. It was also lovely, albeit somewhat sharper, to walk the paths that skirt the bay.

At Timoleague, I saw four cattle egrets roosting at high tide, along with a few hundred godwit, dunlin, oystercatchers and gulls. Among the latter were two relative rarities, Iceland gulls; apparently, they follow fishing boats from their icy home all the way to temperate Ireland. It’s worth the trip for the free grub.

The cattle egrets could be distinguished from the little egrets, which now nest annually in a wood opposite Timoleague Abbey. Both species are gleaming white and about the same size but the cattle egrets stand somewhat hunched, necks drawn down into their shoulders; they are a squatter, stolider bird. The fact there are four of them raises hopes that they may, in time, colonise, as did the little egret from the late 1990s onward.

Last month, my granddaughter thought she was suffering post-party hallucinations when she started seeing small green parrots in trees near her university at Kingston, just outside London. First it was one or two birds, then, one morning she saw a huge flock fly past.

They were, it seems, red-necked parakeets, not a bird one would associate with sedate boroughs on the banks of the Thames. However, parakeets are commonplace in Surrey and it was, perhaps, the busy party life that caused her not to see them previously. They do not come out at night, they are not owls! She has since photographed and researched them, and now sends me pictures and news that there are large, well-established colonies in southwest London, around leafy Kingston, Esher, Kew and Richmond Park.

How did they get there? They certainly did not fly from Asia or Africa, their native home. One story has it that some escaped from Shepperton Studios in 1951 during the shooting of The African Queen with Bogart and Hepburn. Another has it that in the swingin’ 60s, 100 were released by Jimi Hendrix so as to bring a dash of psychedelic brilliance to the London sky. Truth is, no one knows where they came from. Already, in 1855, a pair were reported nesting in Norfolk. They are now so numerous that a roost at Esher Rugby Football Ground contains 7,000 birds and the footpath below has been closed due to the volume of guano falling from above. It is now illegal to release them or allow them to escape in Britain.

In the Canary Islands, we sometimes see one or two, noisy and brightly coloured, whizzing between the tall palms or scuttling about in the massive shade trees in the plaza in the centre of San Sebastian de La Gomera.

Meanwhile, a reader who has a great grá for frogs and who annually notes the first incidence and later progress of the spawn in pools on Dingle, tells me that while kissing a frog may not turn it into a prince, it may yield more useful results if you have diabetes. Slime from the skin of a South American amphibian called the paradoxical frog, Pseudis paradoxa, could provide a new treatment, say scientists. It apparently secretes a substance from its skin which stimulates the release of insulin, the vital hormone deficient in diabetes sufferers. It is now thought this secretion may be synthesised and give new relief to diabetics (see Richard Collins, above).

All of this goes to prove, once again, that those ‘crazy’ environmentalists who insist that all life forms, be it a tiny snail, an unsavoury beetle or a creature that lives a hundred leagues under the sea, should be preserved are right. No road, or mine, or town should be allowed to wipe a species off the face of this planet. However humble or ‘ugly’, in exterminating it, we may lose something which we learn, too late, would help save our lives or the life of the planet.