Our ‘ugly duckling’ the best in town

IT is four weeks since we read that the first swallow had been sighted — nevertheless, it’s always a thrill and a reassurance to see them once again splitting one’s local skies.

Last Sunday week, a friend phoned me from Sherkin Island in Roaringwater Bay to say he’d spotted a flock of martins coming in over the sea, with a single swallow amongst them. The following morning, I spotted two swallows zipping over the River Argideen at Timoleague.

The herons which I reported seeing stalking the field opposite our garden clearly have issues. We have one of them in a box in the yard.

Normally, it resides — in the same box — in the guest bedroom but we put it out to air when the sun is shining. Young herons are subject to hypothermia, although this bird is three-quarters fledged.

News of it was brought to us by a neighbour two Sundays ago. She had spotted it on the road below our house and, brave woman, had transferred it into the wood alongside, where its parents are nesting in a tall tree. A hirsute-looking creature, its topknot a mass of wiry hairs, the white breast streaked with black, the rest dove-grey, it stood, on scaly grey legs, some 18 inches tall. When approached, it fixed one with its yellow eyes, close together on either side of the beak, darted its head forward and snapped noisily.

This was defensive; but we later learned the snapping was also a demand for food.

We were faced with a dilemma. Leaving young birds to their parent’s ministrations is always best; however, it was clear it would be weeks before this bird would be ready to fly and even if the parents fed it on the ground for all that time, they couldn’t constantly guard it against cats or foxes.

A second option, to replace it in the nest 100 feet above the forest floor, was not viable; a local tree surgeon would have kindly done this but he was unavailable.

We considered putting the bird in a wicker turf-basket (much like a heron’s twig nest) and fixing this on a branch 30 feet above the ground; my son volunteered to climb a ladder and secure it. There, it would be safe from cats and foxes, and the parents might feed it until it was fully fledged and could fly. However, if the parents didn’t like this idea, it would certainly die.

The only safe solution was to adopt it ourselves and, so, we found ourselves parenting a heron.

A young heron, at this stage of development, is not like a baby robin, wren or song thrush which require very specialised, largely invertebrate diets.

Our heron, we soon discovered, could put away food like an eating machine.

First to dare its beak, long and pointed as a tailor’s scissors, was Stephanie, my son’s partner, a zoologist. It grabbed her finger, but the snap, while loud and intimidating, wasn’t painful. With the beak open, she poked a lump of razorfish into its gullet, using a long-nosed pliers. For the first few days, this was the pattern; then, it began to snap the food from the nose of the pliers, then to pick up fallen pieces from the straw on the floor of its box.

Its current diet is razorfish (dozens of which, with broken shells, I found on the strand a year ago and, after eating some, put the rest in the freezer) and fish fry given to me by the local fishermen. These are consumed heads, bones and all-important for calcium intake and clearly acceptable. In time, we will have to capture some small, live mullet and put them in a tank and let it fish for itself. With a neck like a coiled spring and an unerring beak, it shouldn’t have any trouble doing so.

We will have volunteers ready to care for it should the need arise. Now that we’ve become surrogate parents, we hope our ‘ugly duckling’ wouldn’t ‘leave the nest’ forever as soon as it can fly. It would be gratifying to see it return to the garden now and then (for a free lunch), and stand, in its adult beauty, by our pond, in which, fortunately, we do not keep fish or frogs.