Buzzard stops by in Reenascreena
ON a narrow, winding road in West Cork, a farmer on an early morning task came upon a large, broad-winged brown bird, “like an eagle”, intent on a roadside breakfast. He stopped his Yeti 4x4 and walked back to discover that the now-risen great bird had been tearing strips from a rabbit road-kill. The man picked up the carcass and cast it across a ditch so that the bird, if it returned to finish its meal, would not be smashed by an oncoming vehicle.
The man was intrigued to have come so close to such a magnificent creature, usually seen soaring on high in circles over his cows on the hills. He did not wait to see if the bird came back to this place with the poetic name of Reenascreena, a point of land at a shrine, known to me in the past when I had stopped to get my bearings. I have no story of a shrine but many out-of-the-way places have religious affiliations where pilgrims once passed.
There is a co-op business in that peaceful countryside which once, like many Munster places, had been thickly timbered, “with foxes flying and plentiful coney and beaver, woodcock and plover and the stag on the mountain as proud as ever”. But the woods were felled, the poet lamented, and the young men had to “go to the ships”, their countryside pleasures being no more.
Buzzards (Buteo buteo) are a fairly recent inhabitant of this part of Ireland, having spread down from Wicklow as they continued to enlarge their territories from Donegal and the northeast from about 25 years ago. The birds had been ‘shot-out’ by gamekeepers on large estates a century before. My first sighting was in the Boyne Valley between Oldbridge and Slane and a first close-up was a perched bird on the toll bridge crossing the river near Drogheda — no doubt an observer for possible road-carrion.
Because this bird of prey is not usually a dive-bombing striker, it has a reputation of living a peaceful life. But it does seek rabbits, voles and frogs and will search for earthworms and investigate carrion, sometimes becoming a victim of poisoned baits.
US Nobel laureate William Faulkner once gave his opinion on buzzards — he was a keen huntsman, even in his Hollywood years when he used to take off into the Californian countryside. The novelist told an interviewer for the Paris Review in 1956 that “if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him, or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger — and he can eat anything”.
The bird does not spend all its time soaring in high circles giving loud mewing calls, with wings held forward in a distinct shallow ‘V’, but spends long periods perched on trees, telegraph poles, fence posts with head hunched into shoulders. For most of us, it is the biggest raptor we will see unless we are lucky touristas in the bigsky country of Extremadura in Spain where eagles soar in rocky defiles and river valleys and in the old city of Caceres, Lesser Kestrels skim between medieval buildings like swifts on still evenings and white storks are masters of about 30 ancient towers.