Tome on the homeplace of birds

THERE’S so much we don’t know about birds. For example, the diets of blackbirds and song thrushes are radically different, although they belong to the same family. 

They eat the same foods, but in very different proportions. The mellifluous song thrush is a carnivore: worms, slugs, snails and insects comprise 75% of its diet; the other 25% is fruit. The blackbird, also a fine singer but less virtuoso, is a vegetarian, its diet being 80% fruit and just 20% things that crawl or fly.

Meanwhile, song thrushes would seem to be a little on the slow side. Around a thrush’s ‘anvil’ — the stone upon which it breaks open captured snails — whole, empty shells can be found. Wouldn’t the bird know by the weight whether the shell contained a snail and was worth transporting? Apparently not; the not-very-bright thrush only discovers this when empty shells ring hollow. It then discards them. It might, possibly, hope a succulent earwig or two might be decanted during the hammering, but it is surprising that evolution hasn’t, long since, devised a strategy to save this waste of energy.

The pretty kingfisher batters the heads of the fish it catches, killing them quickly and making them easier to swallow. In a book that arrived on my desk this week, I find details of other patterns of behaviour and facts about our feathered friends. The book is called simply Birds of The Homeplace.

The writer Anthony McGeehan, from Belfast, and his collaborator, Julian Wylie, of Baltimore, west Cork, have produced an immensely readable, immensely interesting, and beautifully produced book. Collins Press are the publishers, and although the price is a steep at €24.99, it is a hardback, filled with striking illustrations as well as a discourse which make it page-turner, there being something to learn throughout.

Most bird books are field guides; this is a literary work, not a high-falutin’ self-regarding volume of high-flown prose but an articulate work, nailing down the facts and putting them across in a readable, page-turning fashion. It tells stories; it engages the reader. It contains quite a lot of “Goodness me, well, I never...!” stuff as it reveals such facts as that a swallow arriving here in springtime after its flight from South Africa weighs about as much as a slice of toast; that a quarter of a million of its companions have, meanwhile, been caught and eaten in Nigeria; that the male sex organs of birds re-grow just ahead of the mating season; that birds ability to see polarising light aids their navigation and that Vikings used a crystal to do the same and thus get their bearings when lost, no doubt in Newfoundland fogs.

Common-or-garden birds are, largely, the subjects; as the author says, we Irish are a ‘standing army of birdwatchers’ — we have birds all around us all the time. Visitors to my west Cork home voice surprise at the number of birds visiting our bird table in winter — I’ve listed them in this column, 26 species over the garden as a whole. In the gardens of tropical locations, I don’t encounter so many varieties. In addition, I live on an estuary colonised by 15,000 migrant duck and waders in winter.

In Ireland, we enjoy avian colour, song, regeneration and the busy lives of small miracles on our doorstep. Our common chiffchaff, in this case weighing little more than a buttered creamcracker, migrates as far as West Africa (unless it settles for a Mediterranean winter); the brains of our garden coal tits expand by 30% in autumn, so that they can remember where they have stashed their winter stores of food (would that we humans could learn the same trick; we might then remember where we last put down our spectacles).

Another triumph of this book is the photos, especially photomontages where all members of a species are exhibited together in a tableau, rather like exotic birds used to be displayed in glass cases in hotels, but then they were stuffed and dowdy; here, the photography displays their brilliant, and identifying, colours.

Finally, the book is scientific, quoting numerous respected sources and providing information of bird-watching techniques, photography, etc. I shall buy it for cat-owning neighbours for Christmas.