Winter casts long shadow

IT’S obvious from the letters and emails I get that many readers of this page have a serious interest in feeding garden birds.

Several of them have contacted me recently because they are worried about a decline in the number of birds visiting their feeders.

One man feeds rooks, jackdaws and starlings on a major scale. His wife puts out a loaf of wholemeal bread twice daily, which must have some impact on the household grocery bills. But in the past few weeks much of the bread has remained uneaten and he’s worried that the birds may have contracted some disease.

Starlings across Europe have been affected by disease and numbers have declined. However, as far as I know, the disease has not reached Ireland and our resident population is stable. But this resident population is still swollen by tens of thousands of winter migrants, mostly from Britain. These birds have now flown back home to breed and that is almost certainly the reason why the demand for wholemeal bread has declined.

There are only very small inward migrations of rooks and jackdaws. But in the autumn when their young are fully fledged resident birds form flocks that go foraging far and wide for food. Sometimes the two species mix, they’re closely related, and sometimes they form flocks on their own.

For centuries jackdaws have known about the advantages of urban and suburban living.

Rooks are still primarily birds of the countryside and they nest in colonies in tall trees. But in recent decades they have learned the advantages of urban and suburban areas in winter. But in early March the foraging flocks break up, the rooks return to their rural rookeries and the jackdaws start quarrelling over chimneys and crevices in derelict buildings.

The lateness of spring this year was very obvious when I went trout fishing the other day. The trip, to a magical little limestone river, had been planned months in advance to coincide with massive hatches of large spring olives in the second half of April.

I didn’t see a single olive. But the trout were certainly there, and they were hungry. We used weighted nymphs to winkle them out of the deep pools and they were in winter condition with skinny bellies and big shoulders.

The bank-side vegetation told the same story. Lesser celandines daring to open in a patch of weak sunshine. Some tentative primroses, very little growth in the reed beds, the first young stinging nettles starting appear. This was a scene from mid-March and I was fishing on Apr 20.

Nature Table

BLACKTHORN (Prunus spinosa)

Blackthorn has started to blossom, much later than usual this year. The small, creamy-white flowers with five petals cluster along the shoots and contrast strongly with the dark bark which gives the plant it’s name. That and the long and vicious thorns that also cluster along the shoots. It’s often a dense shrub, much used for hedging, but can grow into a small tree. It should be used with caution as a hedging plant because it has a tendency to produce root suckers and become invasive.

Most of the leaves appear after the blossom and in the autumn some plants produce small blue-black plum-like fruits called sloes. The timber is hard and is used for walking sticks in smaller sizes and as firewood in larger ones. Sloes are naturally bitter but are used for preserves and liqueurs. They seem to have been an important human food in prehistoric times.