 Dalkey Tidy Towns |
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| Dalkey Tidy Towns |
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Wildlife
Newsletter for the Township of Dalkey September 2011 - Michael Ryan |
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My partner had bought a bird feeder in a charity shop. Fundamentally the same as most of the other sunflower seed feeders but they are mostly green plastic while the new one has a metal top, base and perches and clear hard plastic. I thought it might take the birds a while to get used to it before they started feeding from it. I’ve often heard people saying they had recently hung up feeders hoping to get birds in their garden but nothing was coming to them. (The same applies to nest boxes which will often be in place a few years before any birds show an interest and start using them). Eventually an adventurous bird will come to the feeder and have it to himself for a while before other birds see it’s safe and the word gets round like a good restaurant review. We were just about to go out for a walk when we hung out the new feeder and I was thinking it was a pity because we wouldn’t be able to see which species of bird would be first to investigate it. I needn’t have worried though, we were barely in the kitchen door after hanging it when we saw a blue tit fly on to a perch and begin eating. Seconds later a coal tit landed on the other perch. |
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| By the time we got back from our walk a chaffinch was on one side and a juvenile greenfinch on the other while a male bullfinch waited his turn on the nearest branch. Birds attract other birds and there’s always far more safety in numbers for them. We have sparrowhawks flying into the garden regularly, weaving through low hedges and often flying a few inches above the ground hoping to surprise some unwary bird but I’ve never actually seen them catch anything. All along the sparrowhawk’s flight path birds will issue a high pitched warning call and everything ahead will know to take cover and when there’s a lot of birds around the feeders someone is bound to see the predator coming. It’s the same with the big flocks of waders that feed on shorelines in winter. If a peregrine flies in a birds chances of getting caught are significantly reduced if there’s eight or nine hundred other birds identical to it milling about. So if you haven’t been feeding birds in your garden and you want to start, don’t worry if they’re initially slow to come. There was a movie some years back which had the byline ‘If you build it they will come’. In this case you could say ‘If you hang them out, they will come’. It used be said that a good crop of berries meant we were going to get a cold winter since it was nature’s way of providing for the birds in the harsh weather to come. Unfortunately I don’t think nature is that thoughtful and of course the berries that are appearing now are the result of what happened in the past year rather then a prediction of what’s going to happen in the future. The very cold winter followed by a very mild spring would have produced the flowers which are now present as bumper crops of berries. Great masses of rowan berries were already on the trees in July and it looks like the brambles are going to be bent over with big juicy blackberries. Our own wild strawberries in the garden seem to have much more fruit then usual and though very small compared to shop bought fruit they’re very tasty. We’ve already had a pair of blackcaps eating leycesteria berries in July which seemed very early. Some berries like holly need to get a hard frost to soften them before they’re edible for birds. There’s never too much fruit on the wild raspberry bushes that grow on the hill and I must confess the birds won’t get a chance if we see them first, they’re delicious and, like blackberries, no matter how big and ripe they look they’re never ready to eat until they come away easily off the stem, almost jumping into your hand. Maybe this is one way that nature is thoughtful, if they’re not ready for you to eat them they won’t let go without a struggle. I’d heard a bird calling from the conifer hedge at the end of the garden in early August. I was fairly certain it was a blackcap’s alarm call, which sounds like two stones hitting together, but couldn’t see the bird that was making it. Next day it was calling again from the same place but this time the bird emerged from cover and yes, it was a male blackcap. Heard it calling from the same place on subsequent days and was wondering could it possibly have a nest this late in the year? |
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Although
not a great summer for people it seems to have been a good one for wildlife
with birds having two or even three families, or broods. We’d seen
Goldcrest, Treecreeper and Bullfinches all feeding young birds very late
in summer and as I write there’s a wood pigeon sitting on a nest in
a tree further up our road. I asked Dick Coombes of BirdWatch who told me
it was possible the blackcaps were still feeding young or even had a nest.
He’d been doing field work compiling the Bird Atlas and he said ‘he’d
had quite a few pairs of blackcaps doing exactly that “tacktacking”
away’, adding it’s been a phenomenal year for blackcaps with
record numbers of them around the country. It says something about how regular
the dolphins in Killiney Bay have become when we turned our back on them
to look at some insects in the grass on the ‘Green Road’. It
was a lovely humid sunny day and as we had stopped at a bench to prepare
for some leisurely dolphin watching we spotted movement in the grass. The
hot weather had brought out grasshoppers, more then I’d ever seen together.
Some were mating and all were very active while making little chirping sounds.
This sound is known as stridulating and is made by the grasshopper rubbing
its hind legs against its wings. Males stridulate to attract females and
apparently each species of grasshopper has a unique chirp or song and can
be identified by this. There are different species of grasshopper in Ireland
but I think the ones we’d seen were Common Field Grasshoppers. Lucy
was happy enough to let one walk up her tee shirt while I tried to photograph
it. It then lived up to its name by spectacularly launching off into the
air landing a few metres away. |
Red
Admiral and Wasp