Winter of woe as birds fight to survive

THE cold weather has had a big impact on the bird life where I live.

The most exciting event was a record of a species that I have never seen in my garden before.

I got up one morning and there was a small bird hopping about in a snow covered shrub outside the window. There was some condensation on the inside of the glass so I didn’t have a very good view and I first assumed it was a male chaffinch. But it seemed to be darker above and paler below than a chaffinch so I went to get a better look.

Then I noticed that it had a white rump patch and an orange breast rather than the salmon pink of a chaffinch and it was, in fact, a male brambling in winter plumage.

Bramblings are finches that live and breed in the spruce and birch forests of northern Europe and Asia. In winter they move south, usually in huge flocks, and occasionally a few reach Ireland, though normally only eastern parts of the country. I checked the Irish Birding website to see if anyone else had reported bramblings driven in by the hard weather. I found recent reports of a pair in Co Cork and another single male from Co Waterford. My sighting was in Co Kildare.

This was good news but unfortunately most of the bird news through the long cold snap was bad. There has been quite a lot of mortality. Going for a walk I came across several feathered corpses in the snow – robins, blackbirds and a rook. Some of the corpses had been partially eaten, though I don’t know whether a cat, a rat or a magpie was responsible. I also noticed a considerable reduction in “flight distance” in a number of species. This is the distance to which a bird will allow you to approach before it flies away.

The most dramatic example of this was the day I drove my Land Rover down the snowy lane to get out to the village for supplies. I came round a corner and there were two cock pheasants facing each other in the middle of the road. They were about 20 centimetres apart and staring motionlessly into each others eyes.

There are no pheasants reared around where I live so these were true wild birds. I reckoned that the hard weather had driven one desperate male to invade another’s territory in search of food and this was the confrontation.

I also expected them to run or fly at the sight of the approaching vehicle but flight distance had disappeared completely in the emergency and I had to brake to a slithering halt in the snow and blow the horn before the birds ran out from under the front bumper. Later, I took the dog for a walk and he started chasing sluggish blackbirds out of the hedge bottom. One of them was so sluggish that he actually caught it in mid-air. Luckily he was as surprised as the bird and he dropped it, allowing it to escape.

The finches, tits and sparrows that are regular visitors to the wild bird feeding station have had more than the hard weather to contend with. There’s been a lot of new competition. The most effective newcomers are a small squadron of half a dozen starlings. They dive down and intimidate the smaller birds, though they can’t manage using the hanging feeders, which conserves some supplies.

Supplies became an issue because we were snowed in for a few days. Luckily, I had a bin full of rolled barley that I use for feeding poultry and I used this to eke out the peanuts and wild bird seed.

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