Having a berry merry Christmas
We are the most northerly country in the world to have relatively mild winters where the temperature normally stays above freezing.
The bulk of these winter migrants are water birds and because of this the average person doesn’t encounter them very often.
One exception is the fieldfare, a species of thrush distinguished by its relatively large size and slate grey crown and rump. Most of the ones that come to Ireland in winter return to northern Scandinavia to breed, though we get a few birds from Russia and central Europe. If there’s a period of hard weather in Britain the birds tend to flee westwards and we can get a massive influx.
They normally form flocks, often mixed, containing redwings, and they prefer to feed on pasture land, eating earthworms and other invertebrates.
They don’t have particularly powerful beaks to dig with so can only find worms in mild and damp weather when they’re close to the surface.
As the winter progresses there is normally a shift to a vegetarian diet with the emphasis on fruit and berries. They first turn from the open fields to the hedgerows, and this is one of the reasons why Ireland is so attractive.
We still have some of the best mixed hedgerows in the world for berry-eating birds. Haws, wild rose hips, sloes, crab apples and ivy berries stay on the hedge all winter.
But there’s competition for all this food. Fieldfares are aggressive birds and an individual will often respond to the competition by fiercely defending a good berry bush, attacking birds of all species that come near it.
The same fearless aggression shows itself back in their breeding grounds. They nest in colonies, which is unusual for a member of the thrush family, and if anything threatens the colony they mobilise into an army and attack it.
The soldiers lunge and peck and batter with their wings but one of their more off-putting weapons is to bomb the intruder with droppings. There’s some amazing footage of this on the internet.
If the wild berries run out they’ll come into gardens in search of ornamental berries like cotoneaster or berberis.
Their possessiveness and aggression can cause a certain amount of turmoil among the more normal garden birds.
The yew is one of a very small number of native Irish evergreen trees and its dark green foliage stands out at this time of year.
But they are rare as woodland or hedgerow trees and commonest in graveyards or abbey grounds. We know from bog wood and the pollen record that they used to be much commoner. They were eliminated from the open countryside by farmers because all parts of the tree are poisonous and the needles can kill livestock.
There is a yew wood in the Killarney National Park, which is almost certainly a plantation. Yews are very long-lived. No Irish specimens have been authenticated as being truly ancient, but there are British specimens which are certainly 2000 years old, and may be even older. They are hard to age accurately because they normally become hollow in middle age.
The Irish yew (Taxus baccata hibernica) has upward-pointing branches and is much planted. All Irish yews are clones of a mutant sapling discovered in Co Fermanagh in 1740 which still survives on the Florencecourt estate.
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