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Wildlife Newsletter for the Township of Dalkey     
                   JUNE / 2019 - Michael Ryan
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  A cuckoo calling on Dalkey Hill in May was heard by a number of people. There might have been more than one cuckoo passing through as a few weeks earlier someone else had heard one calling from the small eucalyptus wood. That’s just up the road from us, well within hearing range, and I missed hearing that one as well but nice to know there was at least one around.
But we did hear another very welcome summer visitor when, below the Vico Road, a little burst of song drew attention to a pale bird perched on an elder bush beside the path down to the beach. As we wandered down the path it flew over us onto a patch of bramble singing as it flew and yes, as suspected and hoped, it was a Whitethroat. It’s been a traditional breeding area for whitethroats there going back decades but they‘d been absent in recent years. The whitethroat singing is the male, he’ll arrive at the territory before the female and he will start to build a number of potential nests before the female chooses one. We eventually got to see the theatrical production of War Horse, the very moving story set against the horrors of the First World War with a horse, Joey, as the central character. The production has become deservedly famous for the animation of the horses onstage by puppeteers, openly visibly holding and manipulating the perfectly rendered life size puppets of the horses so brilliantly that after a while you have to suspend belief that the horses aren’t actually real.
   The opening scene is set on a summer day on a farm in Devon, a rural idyll that will later contrast with the horrors of the trenches to come. Horses aren’t the only animals on stage, there’s a very amusing goose on the farm and sinister crows on the battlefield but the first animated creatures the audiences sees being manipulated onstage are a pair of swifts on top of poles, screeching as they wheel through the air over the farm. The bird’s wing movement is accurately rendered and the actual calls we hear are real swift calls. You might have thought swallows would be a more apt bird to be depicted flying over a farm as we tend to associate swifts with cities, screeching above the streets and nesting in old buildings but in fact a lot of swift’s feeding time is spent hawking insects from over farmland, woods, fields and water and they’re known to travel hundreds of miles in a day to feed. British breeding swifts were found hunting flies over Germany. Back in the nest their young will cope with intermittent feeding by settling into a low metabolism torpor until the parents return with their crop full of insects. Swifts, the fastest birds flying in level flight (peregrines reach higher speeds when diving), are well adapted to long flights with one recorded covering more than 3,100 miles in just five days during its migration from Africa back to the UK.
Whitethroat, singing below the Vico
Road. Image: M. Ryan
   Sadly swifts have suffered a catastrophic decline in populations over recent years. Dick Coombes of Birdwatch Ireland told me that between 1998 and 2016 Ireland’s swifts declined by 58% though he clarifies that by stating ‘it should be noted that Swift, like manyA cuckoo calling on Dalkey Hill in May was heard by a number of people. There might have been more than one cuckoo passing through as a few weeks earlier someone else had heard one calling from the small eucalyptus wood. That’s just up the road from us, well within hearing range, and I missed hearing that one as well but nice to know there was at least one around. But we did hear another very welcome summer visitor when, below the Vico Road, a little burst of song drew attention to a pale bird perched on an elder bush beside the path down to the beach. As we wandered down the path it flew over us onto a patch of bramble singing as it flew and yes, as suspected and hoped, it was a Whitethroat. It’s been a traditional breeding area for whitethroats there going back decades but they‘d been absent in recent years. The whitethroat singing is the male, he’ll arrive at the territory before the female and he will start to build a number of potential nests before the female chooses one. other migrant species that winter in sub-Saharan Africa, is prone to fluctuations, from year to year, so the actual decline may be a bit less. Still alarming.’ Similarly in the UK they suffered a population drop of 51% between 1995 and 2005 and the same situation is occurring across a lot of Europe.

One reason is undoubtedly food loss due to the decline in flying insects but another reason is loss of nesting habitats since traditional sites under roof eaves are often filled in to make houses more secure. Artificial nest boxes have proved very successful for swifts when positioned in the correct place accompanied by tapes playing swift calls. Lynda Huxley from Swift Conservation Ireland is coming to Dalkey to see how we can help our local swifts and will be giving a talk and slide show at 7.30 pm at the Heritage Centre on Tuesday 11th June. The talk is followed by a Q&A Session. Hopefully (weather permitting) this will be followed by a walk locally to spot swifts. The last time I’d visited Emo Court in County Laois was over 20 years ago and the then owner would sit in his car to sell tickets in the car park and later give guided walks around the spectacular house, designed by James Gandon the architect of the Custom House. That owner subsequently gave the house and grounds to the state and lived out his days in an apartment in the great house. The house is still being restored by the Office of Public Works while the expansive grounds have been returned to a more orderly condition with paths winding around a lake and through woodland. Perhaps the most impressive feature is a long avenue lined by Wellingtonia or Giant Redwoods trees through which the house is frame in the distance.
      
             Redwood Avenue at Emo Court House in Laois Image: M. Ryan

   Treecreeper with Tiny scrap of food for     her young in Killiney Wood.
                Image: M.Ryan
   Redwoods have a dense spongy bark, an adaptation to protect them from fire. When forest fires rage through their native habitat in California the heat causes the cones to drop and open and the seeds can then germinate in ground burnt clear of undergrowth and nitrogen enriched by the fire, all the while the towering parent trees will receive a scorching but no fatal burning. I’d heard many times the soft bark is often used by
treecreepers to roost or nest in but I never actually knew anybody who’d witnessed that so it was a great privilege to actually see in one of the Emo redwoods a treecreeper taking food into a deep indentation in the bark, a action it would often repeat while we were observing, suggesting there were hungry chicks inside.
   Ivy had been cut away from some of the redwood trunks, the chainsaw cuts visible on the bark, but it was on one of the redwoods that still had ivy growing up it that Lucy spotted something interesting. At the base of the trunk were clustered grey pellets, comprised of fur and tiny bones, this was indigestible material that had been spat out by a long eared owl which almost certainly being roosting in the tree during the daylight concealing itself in the ivy during the daytime. Ivy is one of the best plants for wildlife for many reasons and minutes later we saw another example of its worth.
   As we’d walked down the avenue a croaking raven had flown out, soared around then set to chasing away a buzzard. From behind it came the sound of juvenile ravens calling from the dense woodland it had flown from and it seemed likely the birds had nested in one of the tall conifers. On the way back up the avenue we followed a adult raven into the edge of the woods and saw it fly to a nearby tree. A big ivy winding around the tree still had a good crop of little round black berries and I was fascinated to see the raven proceed to feed on them, its huge bill delicately picking out individual berries. All the time a juvenile raven was calling very persistently from a tree and then the adult flew to it and disgorged the berries to the juvenile, a fascinating sight to witness. Apparently there’s more calories in the flesh of a ivy berry then in a Mars bar so it’s a very nutritious food source. Back home in Dalkey and Killiney the local ravens have bred again and we saw treecreepers using two nest sites and subsequently feeding young.

                  



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