Sara Maitland
Oystercatchers are nesting in my garden – what a treat
One of the first signs of spring on the upland moor where
I live is the weird haunting ‘song’ of the newly arriving oystercatchers.
Oystercatchers, like curlews, are short-distance migrants. They travel up to 20 miles inland from the coast where they spend most of the year, to their favoured nesting grounds, which tend to be on open rough grassland.
But it is not just in their capacity as heralds of spring that I enjoy them. Oystercatchers are both beautiful and weird; large, complexly patterned in black and white and with remarkable long, straight, bright-red bills and matching legs. And should you wonder how they could possibly use these bills to catch and eat oysters, the answer is they don’t – they are misnamed. They do eat other molluscs, such as cockles, though.
I list oystercatchers high among my favourite birds. So it is of some real excitement to me that this year I have a pair nesting in my garden. And not simply in my garden, but less than 14 metres from my large bedroom window, so that I can lie in bed and watch them.
I built my house on the foundations of a long-ruined steading. Attached to the back of the house was a single-storey barn that had in fact been the byre (milking parlour) and the dairy. It had a solid stone wall about three metres high, with two doorways and four small windows, but the roof was more or less rotten. I cleared the roof off but I kept the wall, which is partly drystone and partly cemented, so that I could have a sheltered walled garden, as I live on a very windy hill.
The top of this wall is only about 50 centimetres wide and it is not capped or finished. It seems an extraordinary place for such large birds to nest – although oystercatchers don’t ‘nest’ in the usual sense but just lay their eggs in an unlined little hollow of grass or stones.
FEAR OF FALLING
When I first realised that oystercatchers were nesting here – and had indeed laid four large white eggs with black patches on them – I was anxious that, after they hatched, the chicks might fall off the wall, which seemed potentially disastrous. But I have learned that, although they may indeed fall off, it will not do them much harm.
It seems the parents often lay in such apparently stupid places, but oystercatcher chicks have a very unusual characteristic: they are born able to feed themselves on grubs and worms. Most newly hatched chicks need their parents as much as any mammal does, not for milk, obviously, but for food of whatever kind is appropriate for each species. The usual way of providing nutrition is by the parent birds bringing it directly to the nest, but although – I’m told – the parent oystercatchers (and especially the males, interestingly) do supervise their broods after they hatch, they do not need to feed them. Even falling off a three-metre-high wall will not do the young any harm.
So now I’m hoping that if the chicks do fall off, they will tumble into my walled garden, rather than the other side of the wall. This is partly because I think they will be safer from predators, but more because, once there, they will not be able to escape until they’re fully fledged and can fly over the wall.
The delight of watching four oystercatcher chicks from the comfort of my own bed will do something to make up for this long winter we’ve endured.
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