‘Pie’ in the sky... then reality bites

THE heron hesitated.

A few small fish seemed to have satisfied it, which I was glad to see. A sizeable tub gurnard — the ‘grunting’ gurnard — still lay in the stream that runs through the gravel of our courtyard. The heron regarded it, then turned away to step a few dainty paces to the pond where it lowered its beak into the water and raised it again, drinking.

Meanwhile, out of the green shadows beneath the trees, the magpies swooped, a pair. Before the heron (“Ron”, as he was dubbed by the English girl who fed him his first morsel when he was but a freaky-looking fledgling fallen from his nest) turned, one of them had dunked its head beneath the water, seized the fish, and winged away into the half darkness followed by its mate, their black feathers iridescent as they caught the sun.

They are beautiful birds, the thieving magpies. This morning, as I was having breakfast, one perched on the pergola above the balcony outside the window. Seen from below, its belly was as white and round as the perfect snowball, flawless and brilliant, stopping at the perfect half-circle of its tar-black breast.

Then, the black head, and the black beak with a silver sheen, and the clean white stripes on the wings, which were not black but steel blue when they caught the light, and all finishing in the long, wedge-shaped tail, not black but shimmering green, shining like an old stout bottle in the sun.

Were one to arrive here from overseas at night and open the curtains in the morning to catch one’s first glimpse of Ireland and see a magpie as I did today, one would surely think one had arrived in an exotic land, where peacocks and birds-of-paradise would be commonplace. And, of course, were you a visitor at our house, you would see the tall grey heron drinking at the pond.

Magpies incite urban outrage with their predations on garden birds during the nesting season. In the country, they are sometimes culled by gamekeepers and even conservationists, this to protect ground-nesting birds like grey partridge, red grouse, quail, woodcock and snipe, all threatened species. Certainly, they rob other birds’ eggs and fledglings. Happily, this predation occurs mainly when they are feeding their young and for most of the year they eat insects and grain. These days, young magpies, as yet tail-less, are seen teetering on telegraph wires or careering rudderless over hedges. Clearly, it is hard to steer without a tail.

Magpies are well known to steal and hoard bright objects, as do their cousins, the jays, who also bury acorns but regularly forget quite where, this resulting in saplings which, in time, become mighty oaks. A friend of mine had his watch nicked by a magpie; he had taken it off while probing the innards of his car engine. However, he knew the location of the magpie stash and retrieved it, as he did regularly with teaspoons and sugar-tongs stolen from the garden table after picnics or afternoon tea.

As I write, Ron is standing outside my work room window, two feet away from the screen, his beak open and clacking deep in his throat to tell me he wants lunch, having, as I said earlier, lost half his breakfast to the magpies which, after their successful raid, spent 10 minutes rattling in the dappled shade beyond the stream with unseemly glee.

How they managed with the gurnard I can’t imagine — a gurnard’s head is like an armoured wedge and its body is ‘boxed in’ by ridges of bone. Ron deals with them by swallowing them head first. I refuse to feed Ron on demand, because he is becoming lazy. While his siblings stand up to their bellies in the shallows of the bay, fishing for a living, he roosts on a tree above the yard — or in the yard itself — for half the day.

I’m prepared to feed him scraps of fishing-trawler bycatch, putting undersized fish to good use, but I try to confine this to alternate days so that he is forced to hunt for himself. I believe he does this, morning and evening. On most days, he turns up on his tree-roost at about 11 and leaves at around six.

A friend tells me he saw him fishing in the ebbed channel at sunset, and a very pretty picture he made.