Amateur twitching ticks all the boxes

THE bird programmes on television are often fascinating with stories of twitchers in obsessive pursuit of rarities or dedicated birders working out how many caterpillars tits eat per day, or how may eggs a cuckoo lays and where.

In the measure of our knowledge of natural history, we have a great deal to thank these hard-working, tick-gathering obsessives for. The ticks I refer to are, of course, ticks on the list of birds they’ve sighted, not the ticks they gather when they lie in meadows watching cuckoos and meadow pipits, although they may gather these too.

Given this dedication and the contribution it makes to our store of knowledge, it would be schadenfreude to titter at British twitchers’ embarrassment when, late last year, they discovered that an American kestrel spotted in Suffolk — the last was seen 30 years ago — was not an extremely rare vagrant but, rather, an escapee from a local aviary.

Thousands of twitchers, alerted on their pagers, stood ready to jump aboard planes, trains or automobiles when somebody spotted a ring on its leg. It was duly captured and returned to the aviary.

But, let not this disappointment deter us from watching our bird tables this winter. It is perfectly possible that semi-rarities, such as blackcaps, waxwings or even snow buntings could turn up.

The snow at the end of November brought flocks of redwing to our garden and to the line of beech trees beside the stream where they rushed about, tossing the dead leaves high into the air, burrowing under them and furiously scrabbling at the earth beneath. They moved in ranks and small armies.

Blackbirds also arrived in numbers, these no doubt from mainland Europe. Here, they found snow but most seem to have survived it.

I have heard of few casualties, unlike last year when migrant thrushes arrived exhausted and died in legion, too weak to scrabble in the leaves or snow like this year’s more robust influx. They were well ahead of the harsh continental weather and the ground, at least here in west Cork, wasn’t frozen beneath trees or shrubbery.

Now, they forage in the big field opposite our house. This stretch of rough grazing has lain untended and unimproved for decades, host to a huge diversity of weeds; ragwort, bartsia, fleabane and knotweed amongst them. It must now also be host to a myriad of insects and worms, given the flocks of starlings (200 strong), redwing, fieldfare, song and mistle thrushes, blackbirds and finches which, morning to night, patrol it: there is not a minute of daylight when birds of all kinds are not busy foraging on the short grass.

As I look up from my computer, I can see 30 or more in the near distance, amongst them grey [hooded] crows and wood pigeons, with a few rabbits grazing between the horses which, in today’s mild temperatures, must feel overheated in their winter overcoats.

Filling in the weekly data for BirdWatch Ireland’s Garden Bird Survey over the Christmas and New Year, one could not but feel a little chuffed to note, amongst our exotic visitors, a tree-creeper, two blackcaps, a pheasant, a sparrowhawk and, best of all, a woodcock.

The woodcock came at night. My son saw a movement beside our small garden pond and, with big-lensed binoculars, we were able to make it out, strutting daintily along the stream edge, bobbing like a wagtail, this strange, dark-brown bird with a flat cranium and eyes that can, literally, see out of the back of its head. In the course of evolution, woodcocks’ eyes have moved to a position high on the skull and to the sides, thus allowing a 360º visual field even when they are probing the ground for insects or worms. However, it didn’t see us, perched on the balcony above, and so we enjoyed a rare and fascinating sighting of this elusive bird, come to enjoy the amenities of our garden.

The commonest garden bird, according to last year’s survey, was the robin. Readers might like to close their eyes and answer an interesting question which Steve Bird, warden at Cape Clear Bird Observatory asked some visitors last May: “Where does the red on a robin redbreast’s face begin?” Now, take a shufti at the robin in your garden. Were you right or wrong? Our score would make an interesting survey, too.