COUNTRY MATTERS
I ONCE saw a jay (Garrulus glandarius hibernicus) in woodland scrub near Kilcash.
My fellow adventurer declaimed the memorable lines about that place: “What shall we do for timber?/The last of the woods is down/Kilcash and the house of its glory, etc...” I responded: “No sound of duck or geese there/Hawk’s cry or eagle’s call...”
And, from another poem: “My merry hound tied tightly/ From sporting and chasing... till the woods are falling/So we’ll to the ships at Galway/ Sean O Duibhir-a–gleanna, your pleasure is no more.” (The translation was Frank O’Connor’s, a literary hero of our youth.)
All this, I must point out, was a long time ago. My poetic friend, moved by the romantic history of the place, was a person of fame and renown; I, a scribbler on what was described in the newspaper as ‘Entertainment and the Arts’.
But I remember the jay. I have not seen one since — either in the Tipperary woodlands or elsewhere.
But, last week, a reader and his children had a jay encounter while strolling among trees near Douglas in Cork. They were looking for a suitable incline in the landscape for tobogganing when a handful of jays — unusual as they are solo or paired birds — flitted through trees offering a “great splash of colour”.
Although shy and wary of humans, jays have this reputation of showiness. The name is a dismissive term for a flashy dresser, a chatterer, according to some sources.
The Welsh call the bird a “shrieker of the wood”; the Irish name is ‘screachog’; but the legendary naturalist WH Hudson, described the jay as being “not altogether unworthy of being called the ‘British Bird of Paradise’.”
Jays are as gifted as starlings at mimicry and have a large repertoire of sounds. One man in the UK had a pet jay which used to bark like a dog if one came into the garden! This usually shyest of corvids can imitate cats, crows, owls, sparrow hawks, grey herons and, if domesticated, telephones and alarm clocks.
The species is essentially an inhabitant of woodland, a raider of birds’ nests, a hunter of small mammals, devourer of beetles — and a remarkable harvester of acorns. In the autumn, it plucks them directly from oak trees and carries them singly in beak or in a sublingual pouch. It then hides the acorns in crevices — or more regularly buries them under dead leaves and earth for hard winter times.
During an intensive twomonths of harvesting, one bird can make 50 flights a day, collecting about 5,000 acorns for secreting in larders. It has a remarkable memory and can find these stores even under deep snow. Some acorns may be missed, of course, the more to help in woodland re-generation.
Gamekeepers on shooting estates were their great enemies as they were lumped with all predators of partridge and pheasant poults. But jays had an added value in their plumage of chequered blueand-black coverts, sought by milliners and salmon fly-tiers. Afforestation has helped contain numbers at around 10,000 pairs, supplemented in winter by European visitors.
I trust jays are still in the Tipperary woodlands where the “stag is on the mountain, swift and proud as ever”.