Earlier hedge-cutting will condemn many birds to an early death

LAST YEAR the company that collects my rubbish stopped doing so. When I phoned them to ask why, they said the driver of the bin lorry had objected to having his vehicle damaged by overgrown hedges.

I admitted to living down a long, narrow lane-way lined by rather magnificent hedges. I put down the phone and considered my options.

In the end I reluctantly got the permission of the landowners concerned and paid a considerable sum of money to a man who owned a tractor-mounted hedge-cutting machine. Luckily this happened in the autumn when it’s legal to cut hedges.

Mechanical hedge-cutting is often a controversial matter and it has been in the news recently. Section 40 of the Wildlife Protection Act, as amended in the year 2000, prohibits hedge cutting between March 1 and August 31. There are certain exemptions for such things as road safety. The farming organisations are lobbying to have the no-cutting period reduced by a month to end on July 31.

The main reason for the ban is to protect nesting birds. Because woodland is a relatively rare habitat in Ireland our birds, and some insects and mammals, are particularly dependent on our rich heritage of hedgerows. Nesting birds, and their eggs and young, are particularly vulnerable to predators and depend largely on concealment for protection. If the hedge is cut during the breeding season the presence of the nest is revealed to magpies, grey squirrels, feral cats, hooded crows and other potential nest robbers.

What many people don’t realise, even people who live in the countryside, is the breeding season is not confined to the spring months. Many species are late nesters and many more have multiple broods that are raised throughout the summer.

Wood pigeons, for example, are only capable of rearing two young at a time and need to do this three, four or even five times in the year to maintain their population levels. The final brood is often still in the nest well into September. And the most likely place for a wood pigeon to nest is a tall hedgerow.

This means August 31 is quite an early date to allow hedge cutting to resume and changing this to July 31 would undoubtedly condemn many young birds to death.

But there is another reason to resist this change, one that’s often over-looked. Spring and summer cutting is very bad for the hedge. Most Irish hedgerow plants are deciduous trees and shrubs. If you cut them while they’re actively growing they bleed sap and loose vigour.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the various types of machine used to trim hedges do not cut branches neatly — they scarify them, removing large strips of bark, which benefits neither the hedge nor the farming lobby.