The blackcap bully at the bird table

WE have a bully at the bird table.

A hen blackcap (which, actually, has a red cap) drives off all other birds and commandeers three peanut feeders and the bushes they hang on as her own. The only successful competitors are a troop of long-tailed tits, a dozen strong, that arrive a few times daily and swarm all over the feeders so that there is hardly room enough for another beak.

Not many blackcaps – greenish, robin-size warblers – are to be seen in Ireland in January and I am happy to help sustain her. Seeing her recalls the rich song of the black-capped male, with its fluted notes and melancholy endings, that I so often heard in the banana plantations in La Gomera in the Canary Islands. But she is a terrible bully. She can’t possibly consume 5% of the peanuts in the feeders, yet won’t let other birds get near them.