Ingham’s W RLD
EVEN a bird nut like me has his breaking point. It came yesterday at 5.28am when a blackbird started singing away outside my bedroom, telling the world he had survived the night and was looking for love. He was feeling so frisky that he didn’t let up – and so I took his lead and got up myself.
Across the land the dawn chorus is waking up thousands every morning, leaving victims wondering whether to curse or embrace this phenomenon of nature.
According to a new fact-packed bird book, there’s a good reason why the dawn chorus occurs just before the sun rises. Sound travels 20 times more effectively at daybreak because it is generally quieter. But the best singers may be trying to make up in music for what they lack in beauty. The plainer the bird, the better the song. So the drab old nightingale and song thrush are master choristers while the dazzling peacock or shocking pink bullfinch can’t sing for toffee.
Author Niall Edworthy highlights many a birdie extreme. Puffin parents will fly hundreds of miles a day searching for fish for their only chick who skulks underground in an old rabbit burrow.
The bird that stays airborne longest is the sooty tern which can go 10 years without ever touching land. The highest flier was a Ruppell’s griffon vulture at 37,000ft. We know that because it crashed into an airliner above Ivory Coast.
The most fuel-efficient is the blackpoll warbler which makes a 90-hour migration from Canada to South America, flapping its wings four million times and using no more energy than contained in a small Mars bar. A car would need to manage 700,000 miles per gallon to match it.
Birds also resort to chemical warfare. The fulmar, a stiff-winged seabird, spews smelly, fishy gunk on any unwanted visitors, while fieldfare, Viking thrushes that winter here, go further: if they see a bird of prey they form a squadron and poo on it from a great height. Hence Niall’s nickname for them which sounds a bit like Spitfire.
The versatility of birds has been appreciated for millennia. Ancient Greek poet Aeschylus is said to have died when an eagle mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise on it to try to crack its shell.
Finally, when blackbirds scurry across the lawn, pause and tilt their heads, they are not listening for worms as is often claimed. Their eyes are on the sides of their heads and they are looking for tiny movements in the soil.
The Curious Bird Lover’s Handbook by Niall Edworthy, Black Swan, £8.99. SUMMERS may never be the same again, according to cricket’s bible. Traditional English conditions could be gone in 20 years through climate change, says Wisden. Higher temperatures will bring drier pitches and extreme storms may make rain stop play more often. “The ball,” writes Tanya Aldred, “may not move in 2025 the way it did in 1985.” FOR years Japan has made a mockery of a global ban on whaling by claiming its hunt is “scientific research”. This week an expert panel appointed by the International Whaling Commission said Japan’s “lethal sampling” of whales is not justified.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare said the report “highlights even more the pointlessness of these unnecessary and cruel hunts”. GREEN TIP: Deter clothes moths with a bag of lavender in the wardrobe. MRS Tiggywinkle has that most modern of afflictions: an allergy. Hedgehogs are lactose intolerant and drinking milk gives them a dicky tummy, says the People’s Trust for Endangered Species and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. They much prefer petfood, crushed unsalted peanuts and water. THE world’s fastest bird is helping BAE Systems and City, University of London design the planes of tomorrow. They are studying how peregrine falcons can dive out of the sky at 200mph in pursuit of pigeons. They’re hoping to learn how to make planes more aerodynamic, more manoeuvrable and easier to land.