Teeming bird life surprises visitors

IT was a singular pleasure to be able to show off Ireland at its best to our visitors from the balmy isles of the Canaries.

They hadn’t believed that Ireland had sun. Again and again, they’d waved our protestations away and said they’d come to visit us “next year”. Over a decade “next year” began to sound like ‘mañana’, a time that never comes.

But this year, finally they arrived. We had told them that May and June were the best months — they have been, for the last five years. But now, in 2011, we had April in June perhaps because we’d had June in April. However, when they arrived, the sun obligingly shone and they got five days during which they saw the legendary Irish rain only once and then it wasn’t a downpour, only “the mist becoming rain”.

The mist was magical, sweeping in over the sea-facing fields and dyeing the green grass a deeper green. Horses grazing in the middle distance became veiled from view, a white horse amongst them, standing amongst buttercups.

During those rare halcyon days, how proud we were of Ireland, the emerald fields, the purple mountains, the black bird-cliffs at the Old Head of Kinsale where kittiwakes and fulmar rode the updraughts, and guillemot and razorbills, silent to our ears, clamoured at their rookeries and, in huge rafts, carpeted the deep, blue sea. It was there that my Gomero friend put the heart across me, sitting on the very edge of the cliff to photograph the birds. I have a head for heights but I could hardly watch him. Happily, there was no tragedy and he and his wife went home singing the praises of Ireland.

The conceit of Canarians is that there is nowhere in the world to compare with their particular ‘isla preciosa’. But now our friends had learnt that our island was every bit as lovely and even more diverse than theirs.

The birds impressed them immensely, the number and the variety. Outside our window we watched two resplendent goldfinches feed their young.

It is the season of fledglings and fledgling casualties, victims of cats and cars. Out driving, my son and his girlfriend saw a small bird in the middle of the road and, realising that it wasn’t going to fly away, they stopped. It was a young blackbird; they were saddened to see two small carcasses, its siblings, squashed on the tarmacadam nearby. As they picked up the chick, the parents flew back and forth on the ditch, uttering cries of alarm. Dropping it into the hedge, they quickly drove off before they, themselves, were squashed by a speeding car.

Rats, too, are frequent road casualties; apparently, wherever one finds oneself, there is a rat only a dozen feet away. However, if one has a heron for company, it will soon be a dead rat.

The other afternoon, as our adopted heron followed me across the yard in expectation of a ration of fish, it suddenly stopped by a clump of tall grasses alongside the pond, stared intensely into the foliage, stepped forward as if walking on thin ice, stretched it neck forward and then, like lightning, shot its head into the greenery and withdrew it, holding a rat.

Gripped by the scruff of the neck, the unhappy rat struggled. Herr Heron dropped it, only to get a better grip, this time clasping the whole neck in its beak.

Then, unhurried, it walked to the garden stream, and dunked its prey. After dunking it six or seven times, the rat was quite lifeless, and our bird proceeded to swallow it, not without difficulty, but in a series of gulps. One witnessed its disappearance and then its passage down the long neck by the bumps therein. It was a three-quarters-grown rat, young, like the heron itself, now about 16 weeks old.

Herons, clever birds, drown captured mammals before eating them and hold fish too large to swallow out of the water until they expire, then eating them in bits. We are glad to see our foundling can, by instinct, now hunt for itself. A useful bird, Ron the Ratter — who needs a terrier when one has a heron?