Buzzards spread their wings in Ireland

THERE is still quite a bit of tillage farming around where I live, mostly winter cereals.

Because of the bad summer weather the harvest was late this year. Fields that should have seen the combine harvester quite early in August were not cut until well into September.

So for the past few weeks these fields have been in stubble and they’re only being ploughed now for re-seeding. These late stubbles have been the scene of some exciting bird spectacles – large brown and white birds of prey hunting the margins and headlands and soaring high in the sky over the fields.

They are buzzards, and the reason they’ve been there is that rats and mice have been venturing out from the hedgerows to glean left-over grain from the stubbles. The rodents have a strong instinct to store grain in dry underground chambers in the autumn to provide a nutritious and non-perishable source of food through the difficult days of winter. And buzzards love to eat rats and mice.

Buzzards are very adaptable birds with a knack for exploiting seasonally available sources of prey. Earlier in the year the ones around here were hunting young rabbits; now that the fields have been ploughed you can sometimes spot one hopping rather clumsily over the furrows looking for earthworms. In February they will turn their attention to the large numbers of frogs making their way towards a suitable body of water to spawn in.

But all their prey is taken from the ground and their preference is for small mammals. They are too big and slow to catch birds in flight.

Because they’re so adaptable they’ve become the commonest bird of prey in Britain with about 40,000 breeding pairs. In Ireland they’re nothing like as common. They are, however, our largest bird of prey – or they were until golden eagles, white-tailed eagles and red kites started to be artificially re-introduced a few years ago.

Along with eagles and kites, buzzards became extinct in Ireland over 100 years ago. This was largely because of human persecution. A couple of generations ago the normal reaction of someone spotting a large bird of prey was to shoot or poison it. Unfortunately there are still some vestiges of this attitude left.

The buzzard made its way back to Ireland, without human help, in the second part of the 20th century. There seem to have been two waves of colonisation. The first one was from Scotland into Northern Ireland, and these birds spread first into Donegal and then into Louth, Monaghan and Cavan.

The second wave came from Wales into Co Wicklow and then started to spread out until it met up with the first wave and the speed of colonisation picked up. Buzzards are fiercely territorial birds so every brood that they rear successfully has to spread out and establish a new territory.

I don’t think anybody knows the exact state of this colonisation process today, but I am seeing them more and more frequently and I’m seeing them in parts of the country I never saw them in before. They’re certainly poised to conquer Munster, the last province on their list. Talking to bird people and trawling the internet I see breeding reports from Co Waterford and even the occasional bird spotted in south west Kerry.

So if you don’t have these rather magnificent birds in your area already, the chances are that they’ll be arriving some time soon. Keep your eyes on the sky. A buzzard is a hard bird to overlook.

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