Siskins brighten up our day

WE HAVE siskins at our peanut feeder.

I have no idea where they came from. I’ve never seen them in the garden or anywhere in the mixed woodland around our home.

However, we have old alder trees along the nearby stream and alder cones are a favourite of these vivid little birds in winter. If not seen at a peanut feeder, they are most likely to be seen trapezing amongst the alders, their tails pointing toward the sky. They seem to have a preference for feeding upside-down.

Although relatively common over most of Ireland, they are elusive. In summer, they frequent conifer woods and nest in the high tops, well away from prying eyes.

Lemon yellow, their plumage is streaked with brown and they look like wild canaries (not likely to see in Ireland) or ‘canary mules’ as canaries crossbred with linnets are called. They have notched tails, like the latter species, but are smaller and slimmer than both, with two bright yellow bars on each wing, and in the case of the male, a black crown and chin.

‘Acrobatic’ would describe their feeding habits. They tend to travel in flocks and I have often seen them move in orchestrated groups along a watercourse from alder to alder. Alders are, of course, common everywhere in this too-often wet and flooded land of ours, colonising by the simple but effective evolutionary device of growing over water and dropping their seed cones into the stream below.

Thus, they are carried to new habitat where some will be washed into a convenient bank and take root.

The roots are tenacious, strengthened to withstand raging floods, and the timber can survive for centuries so long as it is wet. During the archaeological digs as Dublin’s Wood Quay, alder posts which may well have been installed by the Vikings were found almost intact and many of the piles upon which Amsterdam and Venice were built are of alder.

We may be proud of our alders, which is almost our national tree. The Irish black alder, Alnus glutinosa, is called Irish mahogany when used in woodworking. The tree grows quickly. I saw a vacant lot near my home become a miniature alder forest in the course of three years. When it was felled, the cut trunks were a dramatic red at first, and even after fading, the timber retained a fine colour.

A very useful tree, this colonisation of the vacant lot was typical. A pioneer species, it was one of the first trees to return after the Ice Ages and, interacting with a bacteria which it supports, it produces its own nitrogen, but with a surplus. This surplus renders the land around its roots fertile; thus it assists in the revival of depleted soil.

As my readers will know, the alder is the only non-conifer to bear cones. In March, its branches are bedecked with pinkish catkins. These open in March and, with the aid of the wind, pollinate the female flowers.

The flowers grow into small, green rounded cones which in October turn brown and hard and produce the seeds. The leaves appear after the catkins, broad and circular, shaped like small, fat hearts. They fall in late autumn, leaving the cones conveniently revealed for the siskins to feed on.

Moving swiftly from the behaviour of birds to that of my family and other human beings, I was struck by a new phenomenon this Christmas.

When I was a boy, the axiom, “The family that prays together, stays together”, was a familiar mantra in Catholic households in Ireland.

Those that didn’t have to emigrate would, it was thought, bond all the more strongly by regular recitation of the rosary in front of the domestic hearth each evening.

Now, in this very different, electronic age, we might say “The family that Skypes together, stays together.”

Christmas 2012 saw folk all over the globe communicate with family and friends via computer screens. Some expert media aficionados even managed ‘conference calls’ in which parents in Ireland and children in far-flung places gathered around screens to chat as they might have once around the Christmas fire.