Linnets flock, redwings whistle
I WAS not a frozen day back in Ireland to stop by woods and take a road less travelled “because it was grassy and wanted wear” when I was presented by readers with sightings of harriers, ravens, linnets and redwings.
I have to thank two, particularly, and many others also for being informative in the past and with being patient at my absence where white storks clap their beaks and crag martins buzz the sunshine walls of high buildings.
Ireland’s cold weather brings many birds closer to mankind for care.
Be alert: they seek food and water. The hen harrier being mobbed by rooks in Wicklow may well have been aerial jousting by ravens and a buzzard. This sighting was from Liam, a cyclist.
Paul texted he had seen a flock of “redwings at the apples and linnets a-plenty”.
The linnets were in north Leinster fields where an enlightened farmer had given over space to the wild in setaside.
Then, in the Independent online was Kathy Donaghy’s story about a red squirrel habitat being saved in Donegal by people pressure on Coilte, who is now changing a route to haul timber. A road less travelled (Robert Frost again) will not be trodden by tractors and the handful of reds will continue to forage undisturbed and make their cosy dreys.
In a town garden, robin redbreast is king of the food supply, cock of the walk of the seeds and nuts suspended in the frosty feeders. But he can’t stop a magpie from gatecrashing a platform where there is food protected by metal bars. The raider, in frustration, evacuates unpleasantly. Magpies have to eat also. We forget. Redbreast cannot deter a lone blackbird from pick-axe plunges into a half-frozen apple. Oatmeal in melted butter is snaffled by blue tits and finches but there are no linnets here. Once a popular cage-bird, especially in the 19th Century, for its attractive song, the linnet flocks on open countryside dictated by a weedseed diet in uncultivated landscape. Young forestry plantations are also good breeding areas for an estimated population of about 130,000 pairs. The redwing, a wary bird, and a common winter visitor from northern Europe and Iceland, is the smallest of the thrushes and more than a million pass through Britain and Ireland in autumn/ winter. They settle in fields and woodlands and gardens of berry-bearing shrubbery. Their flight silhouette and actions resemble starlings, their reddish flanks distinguishing them. They also whistle in the dark!
The writer John Fowles wrote of hearing them in a silent town in France at 3am: “They have a curious cry, a very thin, high-pitched, glistening whistle, an inbreath, like a sudden, small gleam on old silver in a dark room. Strange, remote, beautiful sounds.”
The naturalist Mark Cocker points out that it is incredible that this little bird is shot and eaten in France where it is “more highly regarded than quail or woodcock”.
Redwings are usually wary, unlike most birds from the far north.
However as hungry arrivals, “deargan sneachta” will quickly shatter that cotoneaster berry crop.