Many years ago I was one of a group on a BirdWatch outing around Lehaunstown, off the Brennanstown Road, not far from Cabinteely village. The group was wandering up towards Tully’s Cross passing along a quiet beechlined road then on to open fields. Lovely at any time it used be a great spot for birds in the winter since a lot of the surrounding area was then still working farmland and the cereal crops would attract vast flocks of finches and including hundreds of Chaffinches, Goldfinches and Linnets with every chance of much scarcer wintering Brambling being among them. It was also one of the best places in south county Dublin where there was a good chance of seeing a Yellowhammer. You could walk over fields and along the abandoned railway line for an hour and barely see a soul; it could have been in the middle of the countryside. Further along the track as it approached Heronford Lane, Long Eared Owls used to nest among the conifer plantation. Of course now that abandoned Harcourt Street rail line we used wander along is the busy LUAS line to Bride’s Glen and the cereal fields it once cut through are going to soon become Ireland’s newest town at Cherrywood.
   We were strolling up the road when someone who had seen our group, came out of their house to tell us they’d just heard a woodpecker hammering on a tree. This was years before Great Spotted Woodpeckers arrived to colonise Ireland, when the birds were even exceptionally uncommon as a rarity and any of the species that did arrive here, usually in the west of the country were believed to be birds from Scandinavia. I can’t remember if anyone disillusioned her at the time but we all knew what she’d heard wasn’t a woodpecker but was actually a hooded crow which we’d just seen rattling its bill from a treetop. When you do hear a woodpecker ‘drumming’ on a tree, a territorial and mating call usually performed in early spring, it has a deep resonant rapid quality whereas the crow’s sound has a much higher cadence lacking the low echoing sound.
    Recently we had seen jays quite regularly near the car park on Killiney Hill and one particular morning we saw a pair perched on either side of a tree trunk. We’d been watching them for a while when one of them began rattling its bill, making the same noise as the hooded crow does, if not quite as loud. I was amazed, never knowing any bird apart from the ‘hoodies’ do it.

Crab Spider on a nettle, Dalkey Hill        Photo: Michael Ryan

An adult red squirrel with very wispy ear tufts, Killiney Hill
Photo: Michael Ryan