Sparrowhawk swoops for dinner
Some were sweet, some still bitter. Around them were hundreds of companions, ripening in the sun; they will be ripe by now. The weather reminded us of long-ago summers, footprints-in-the-tar weather — and even better, there was a small breeze, a freshener as there might be on a pet day in May.
The hedgerows now deliver a feast for the sweet tooth, for the eye and, one might say, for the soul. In West Cork and elsewhere, roadsides are on fire with montbretia, that orange alien now established on our verges and, for most of us, a delight. Fuchsia, another garden escapee, flowers in corridors along country lanes.
Our natives, creamy meadowsweet; mauve-headed hemp-agrimony; tall, pink willowherb; yarrow, mostly white but sometimes lavender; dark-purple knapweed, beloved of bumblebees; white ox-eye daisies and blue sheep’s-bit scabious all line the ditches, along with a dozen less showy, more retiring, plants in flower.
A few black-and-amber caterpillars of cinnabar moths haunt the ragwort, one of the most common weeds colonising road margins everywhere. Pretty enough in its early incarnation of bright yellow flowerhead and dark green leaves, it becomes less attractive at maturity when the flowers turn to ragged down, and each downy parachute carries a seed that drifts on the wind to colonise further acres.
It was fortuitous that this morning I saw a sparrowhawk from my desk just as I was about to write a sparrowhawk story that came to me from a reader. The bird, a female, alighted on a roof outside my work-room window and, as I reached for my camera, flew away.
The sparrowhawk is a Montenotte, Cork City bird, notorious for plucking dinners off bird tables, robins, chaffinches, tits, hedge sparrows — it isn’t fussy.
Gerry Hamilton, a North Cork reader who has regularly alerted me to the flocking displays of starlings roosting in woods near his home in early spring, tells me that the swallow nests in his workshops, normally nurseries for eight or 10 clutches each summer, have this year been stripped of each successive crop of fledglings by a sparrowhawk who enters via the custom-built aperture he made for the swallow parents. He is, understandably, annoyed. He may reduce the size of the entrance but it may be a bit late now.
However, swallows will continue to breed up to the end of August. These days, I see lines of short-tailed swallows on the wires, fledglings of the first clutch that haven’t yet grown the needle-like tails of the adults.
Second clutches are not uncommon, and the young of the first brood will help to feed them. However, sometimes a pair will start a second clutch so late that tragedy ensues when the food source, the winged insect population, plummets and they, the parents, are forced to migrate. Weather can also be vital; there is the necessity to catch the winds to help carry them south.
In nature’s pragmatic timetable, fledglings only a few days short of being able to fly and fend for themselves have to sometimes be abandoned and, to the dismay of those who find them, are discovered dead and desiccated in nests in sheds and stables.
Mr Hamilton also told me of a surely unique, and sad, occurrence. A swallow impaled itself on the makeshift clothes-hanger aerial of his son’s car. This is surely extraordinary, given the maneuverability of the species. I can only think that it was a young bird whose want of a fully-grown rudder led to his untimely end.
On a happier note, tortoiseshell butterflies have finally awoken from hibernation and are enjoying the fast-fading flowers of the buddleia in the August sun.
Also, I was mightily chuffed to see swifts nesting under the slates on the fascia of the famous O’Donovan’s Hotel in Clonakilty and whizzing up and down the corridor of houses along the town’s main street. What a sight they were to watch, as I stood waiting for friends to finish their shopping! Deena O’Donovan assures me that she values these non-paying guests as much as she does her paying visitors — and that when time comes to renovate, she will make sure the roofers leave spaces for the swifts.
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