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January

The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude,

in the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The

urban, the cultivated, is hidden …

– John Burroughs

Waterhen

WINTER SEEMS TO GET LONGER AND DARKER the older one gets, and I celebrate and delight in any signs I come across of its approaching end and the longed-for beginning of spring. In the pre-dawn darkness it is a joy, hearing from the warmth of my bed, our early birds beginning to test their vocal cords, tentatively, as if self-consciously rehearsing for the full-scale dawn chorus they will take part in before many weeks have passed. The blackbird quietly tries out, without much success initially, a series of phrases. He keeps trying, however, with long pauses between each attempt, which leave me wondering if he has flown away. But then he starts up, attempting once again to get it right. Towards the end of January his song improves appreciably and the early morning rehearsals get less tentative. Outside my window, the blackbird is joined by the wren and the robin, whose enthusiasm needs no rehearsal. Pliny the Elder wrote that there is not a musical instrument devised by the cunning and art of man that can afford more music than the robin can produce.

Although each of our days, after 21 December, is a few minutes longer than the previous, the dark nights seem to drag on relentlessly and unchanged, for quite a while. January is a strange, slow sort of month, gripping autumn with one hand and spring with the other, standing motionless in frigid neutrality. The month is named after the Roman Janus, a human king who became a god, but deification caused him to develop two faces, one looking back to the old year, the other looking forward. The Anglo-Saxon name for January was Wulfmonath, the month when starving wolves were driven to descend, desperate and ferocious, on human settlements. Only plants like the crocus and the snowdrop brave January’s temperatures, the crocus giving us colour that is astonishingly vivid against the surrounding greys, and the snowdrop, which gleams bright and new, offering hope that spring is near.

I have never forgotten the words Shakespeare used to describe the winter season in As You Like It:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind!

Thou are not so unkind

As man’s ingratitude.

And in Love’s Labour’s Lost:

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick, the shepherd, blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk comes frozen home in pail …

When the days dawn bright and clear, however, January has many gifts to bring. It is a good month for tackling the hills for a walk, and if it has been frosty, usually boggy terrain is firm and lightly crunchy underfoot. We are fortunate to live near the Dublin Mountains, and we have a choice of hills on which to stretch our legs. Nearby, Ticknock is a particularly inspiring place after a light fall of snow. The outlook down to the dark, dirty-looking city makes one so grateful to be high up in a glistening landscape, and the myriad sparkles in the soft dry snow would brighten any spirits. Teresa likes it when the snow is fresh and a couple of inches thick; she says it’s like walking on a duvet. A particular bonus of these conditions is the impossibility, if you watch out for them, of missing the prints left by passing fauna, prints that are not readily visible in normal conditions.

fox

red deer

While most bird species can be relatively easily spotted, even at a distance, because they can make an escape by taking to the air, many of our small corps of mammals, owing to aeons of human predation, tend to be secretive and nocturnal. Often their presence in a particular area can be discerned only by the tracks they leave, or indications of their feeding or grooming, or from as prosaic a matter as their droppings. Some animals, like humans, move from place to place in a fixed routine, and often this means that their frequently used routes can be identified. An extreme example of this is perhaps cattle moving every day from the field where they have been grazing to where they are milked; they walk in single file and wear down the grass to a narrow, bare earth path. It is rarely this extreme in the case of wild animals because they are much lighter on their feet, but it is often possible to see clearly the habitual route a badger takes through long grass, and the tunnel in vegetation the animal makes through a hedge or under a barbed wire fence.

Being able to identify what animal left what prints makes it easy to get an idea of the variety of species that frequent the countryside when you are not there. John Burroughs wrote, ‘The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as effectively as it obliterates. I go into the woods, and know all that has happened. I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his neighbour, the fact is chronicled.’ The best time to read prints in the snow is when it is fresh and the cover is no thicker than an inch or so; in these conditions the prints are well defined without any distortion or blurring. It is also important to try to get out before other walkers and their dogs complicate the situation!

Even if the snowfall occurred only a few hours before, it can be surprising to see how much traffic there has been. Once you learn what the footprints of foxes, hares, rabbits and deer look like, the remaining question that one has to work out is the sequence of passage – which animal came first? On heathery Ticknock, well away from the telecommunications masts, there are often numerous tracks of birds in the snow, particularly those of the red grouse; by carefully observing what you find, you may be able to discern the shape of the smaller female’s foot from the longer, larger male’s.

Hellfire Hill is nearby and is another great place for us to take a walk. Recently, walking in a light covering of snow on the west side of the hill, where less people stray, I was surprised to see how many deer had been active there. The snow showers had been about dawn, three hours before I got there, but the forestry road was full of deer prints, and there were places where you could see that they had dug in the snow to get at grass. There were also lots of rabbit prints, and a fox had been about.

Foot or paw prints are only one of the signs of an animal’s passing that you can detect if you are observant; the term ‘spoor’, an Afrikaans word, means the wide range of signs that wild animals leave behind, such as prints, droppings, signs of grazing, tufts of fur or bark nibbled off a young tree. Sometimes the spoor can tell a story. On one frosty morning in late January on Ticknock I came across the oval-shaped prints of what I took to be a fox. The fox is still a hunted animal, and I could see that, most of the time, it had placed its rear foot precisely in the footprint of its front foot, to reduce its spoor by 50 per cent. I followed it for about forty metres, and then it looked as if the animal had speeded up; the prints were blurred and it seemed as if the fox was kicking up flurries of snow in its wake. The confused trail ended in a hollow where there was much disturbed snow, a tuft of fur, and small patches of frozen blood. I was able to see that at this particular point the fox’s trail had intersected with that of a rabbit, which had run fast for the last few moments only to be caught by the fox. Leading out of the hollow were only the fox’s footprints, a little deeper than before, because he was carrying the rabbit, but reverting to halving his spoor again. I followed him, but the spoor disappeared into a maze of rocks and gorse. By learning more about these signs that animals have been about, we can enrich our outdoor explorations and get a glimpse into aspects of their way of life.

You don’t have to wait for snow to give you a chance of seeing what has passed by before you; wet ground, muddy patches and, indeed, certain kinds of vegetation can all display signs of an animal’s passing. To immerse oneself in the art of identifying spoor is to add an entirely new dimension to one’s countryside wanderings. It is useful to arm yourself with an appropriate book, such as the Hamlyn Guide to Animals Tracks, Trails and Signs, or The Nature Tracker’s Handbook by Nick Baker, because once you begin to look carefully at the ground, you will be surprised at how much you will find that cries out to be identified.

One bird that is always active in the early weeks of the year is the raven, because these birds appear to start their courtship in the winter months. Ravens contrive to have their young at the same time as lambing occurs on the hillsides, and so must start the process earlier than most birds. Lambing provides them with nutrient-rich placentas scattered about the fields, perfect food for their hungry young nestlings. Most farmers hate ravens. When a lamb is born with a serious defect, it is often abandoned by its mother, leaving it to the cruelty of nature. Ravens will concentrate on these, but if there are no sickly lambs about, they can often gang up on a healthy lamb and peck out its eyes or tongue; a blind or tongueless lamb will not survive for long, and as soon as it is dead, the birds will move in, and quickly and expertly disembowel the corpse. Ravens are protected birds, and before a farmer can think of shooting them, he or she has to apply for a permit.

Ravens are, however, only doing what nature dictates. I have great grá for these big birds, and have been fortunate on a number of memorable occasions to observe their spectacular aerial displays. On Hellfire Hill one January morning, I had been hearing the characteristic ‘cronking’ in the distance, a bit like a dog barking, all the way around the hill, and spotted one raven flying above the trees on the west side. A little later, however, I heard a series of calls that ranged from the familiar deep and visceral cronk to an almost melodious ‘Cooook’ and a harsh ‘Kraaaak’, and a trio of ravens flying in close formation came into view above me, jinking and changing places, obviously agitated. It looked like a love triangle, but soon one of them detached from the group, or was forcibly removed, I could not tell, leaving the remaining pair to embark on a series of circuits like ballroom dancers, formating closely together, so close at times that I wondered if, like swifts, they actually mate on the wing? They also performed that manoeuvre that I have only ever seen ravens do, flipping over onto their backs and then returning to normal flight, an aerobatic trick that allows them to see directly down. At one stage this pair seemed to briefly fly mirrored, one flying normally and the other flying upside down above it, calling sweetly to each other all the while. As they disappeared over the trees, I continued my walk with my spirits greatly raised.

ravens

Glendoher, 3 January

Getting out of the car in front of the house, I caught sight of a bird flying quite high, but not too far to clearly observe its shape, and that its belly was a speckled light grey. As it went over the roof of the house, it folded its wings against its flanks and dropped like a stone, vertically, disappearing behind the roof. At that moment I realised that it must be a peregrine falcon – the swiftness of the dive, the verticality of it, and reviewing the form of the bird and the height it was flying at convinced me. I ran into the house and up the stairs to the back room to see if there was any activity in the field, but everything was still, there was nothing to see or hear. A short time before the trees would have been full of noisy magpies and wood pigeons, and the usual robin, hedge sparrow and tits would have been flitting about the garden. Now there was no movement whatever, no bird in sight. The peregrine is the fastest bird in the world, and a species that almost became extinct in Ireland a few decades ago. The bird dives at up to 300km per hour to strike its prey, often a wood pigeon, killing it instantly. This particular peregrine was probably somewhere in the undergrowth of the Spinney, already plucking its prey. It was a wonder to see one of these dramatic raptors in the air over my home.

Glendoher, 8 January

Two mornings ago I watched from the breakfast table as a darting and jinking gang of a dozen magpies put on a vigorous aerial display in the Spinney treetops. Fluttering and swooping, circling and perching, they moved as a team from branch to branch in an attempt to dislodge a much larger bird that was perched in the middle of the Spinney. Eventually the large bird, which I guessed was the resident sparrowhawk, launched into the air, and after making a few threatening lunges at the magpies, it flew snootily and slowly away.

magpie

This morning, however, I was present for a similar but more extended show, and watched it from the beginning through binoculars. As usual, when the winter sun illuminates the branchy fringe at the top of the Spinney and pushes the shadows downwards along their trunks, a flock of wood pigeons arrives to warm themselves on their everyday morning perches. Before long, first a couple, and then more magpies arrive, circling around the pigeons and making threatening darts at them from branch to branch. Soon, as they do every day, the wood pigeons gave up trying to get a bit of warmth and depart for a more peaceful existence somewhere else.

Having sent the docile wood pigeons packing, instead of taking their place as usual, the magpies worked their way westwards along the Spinney, some hopping from branch to branch, others circling and diving, and it was clear that another occupant of the trees had become the subject of their attention. Suddenly, a large, chunky white-breasted sparrowhawk burst out of cover and made an aerial lunge at the magpies. A brief aerial dogfight followed, with the magpies getting more animated, ducking and dodging their victim, and seeming to enjoy every minute of it. The sparrowhawk was fast, but had no effect on the magpies, and after a few passes it perched again, up on the western end of the Spinney. It looked magnificent through the binoculars, its strongly barred, light- coloured breast, its long yellow legs and grey-capped head highlighted in the low sun. The magpies continued their harassment, and after a few minutes, like the wood pigeons, the sparrowhawk just gave up and took himself elsewhere, away from the racket.

But there was more to come. Having successfully flushed the pigeons and the sparrowhawk, the pied teddy boys started concentrating on the lower levels of the Spinney, and it wasn’t long before a male kestrel was flushed out. It flew straight towards my window and over the roof of the house. What a show! Twenty minutes later, the magpie gang had gone elsewhere to see what trouble they could stir up.

The raven was once persecuted almost out of existence, mainly for the reasons mentioned above, but also because it was thought to be an evil spirit. In recent decades, however, there has been a great increase in raven numbers, and many pairs have moved into suburbia, where it is not unusual, if you know what to look for, to see them. One or more of them are frequently involved in skirmishes with grey-backed crows and magpies over the Spinney. In the last two days, however, taking a walk up through a housing estate to our local park, I twice heard, and then spotted ravens. They seem to be preparing for nesting in two tall stands of pine trees, one of them in the old garden of Sir Frederick Moore, about a hundred metres from our front door.

Glendoher, 12 January

Buds are beginning to appear on some plants, and it is a delight when the snowdrops come out; no garden should be without them, if only as a gentle reassurance that spring is on the way. The magnolia is one of the early trees to produce fat buds; its waxy blossoms later on are a joy, if short-lived.

The final great indicator for Teresa and me happens when a morning dawns clear skied, with the early sun making a halo of gold of the myriad bare branches of the Spinney treetops. We glory in this heart-warming sight, and spend our time at the breakfast table pointing out to each other nuances of this new and restoring morning light.

It seems a chore to get oneself out for a walk on a dark January morning; I tend to stick to the nearby foothills for a stretching walk, or a circuit from my front door that takes in a local park. On one such walk I was passing through the park when I was sure I spotted a dipper, one of our most fascinating birds, diving into the gently cascading mountain stream that flows through the park. I kept my eye on the spot in the water where I thought he had disappeared, and stopped close to it, just two metres above the water. There I stood, watching and wondering, but no bird surfaced. I must have mistaken a late falling leaf for the dipper, and I was just about to continue my walk when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of brilliant white through the winter branches downstream. What I first thought was a swan flying just above the stream’s surface was approaching upriver. At this time of year all the landscape is dun-coloured, and the brilliant white of the gently flexing long wings stood out dramatically, but it was not a swan, it was a little egret.

I stood stock still as the bird came closer and closer. It alighted in the stream just metres away, and crouching over, began to search for small fish or snails below some herbs overhanging the stream’s edge. Its dagger-like black beak and black legs contrasted with its whiter-than-white plumage, and what I found remarkable was how the bird’s legs were shivering as if it found the water cold. It did seem to succeed in getting a few morsels, but then it opened its wings, launched itself into the air and disappeared upriver.

The name egret is from the French aigrette, or small heron; this beautifully proportioned bird was once common in these islands, but, because of climate and predation by man, it began its descent into local extinction as early as the fifteenth century. It was regarded as a delicacy by the aristocracy, and was often included on royal menus: the feast to celebrate the enthronement of George Neville as Archbishop of York in 1465 included 1,000 little egrets among the ‘poultry’ served. The birds’ long feathers were sought- after for plumes to decorate hats in the eighteenth century: in the first three months of 1885, 750,000 egret skins were sold in London alone. The bird was rare even in southern Europe by the 1950s, but new conservation laws saw numbers increase strongly, and by 1997 the bird turned up in coastal regions of Cork, Waterford and Wexford. In the last twenty years it has had an amazing recovery in Ireland, and can now be found in most coastal counties. I spotted my first ‘park’ egret in nearby Marlay Park in 2018, but, until this, I had never been so close to one.

It was a remarkable coincidence that the American landscape poet Mary Oliver had died, at the age of eighty-three, only a week before this encounter. I remembered some evocative lines that she had written in her poem ‘Egrets’ and looked them up again when I got home:

And that’s how I came

to the edge of the pond:

black and empty

except for a spindle

of bleached reeds

at the far shore

which, as I looked,

wrinkled suddenly

into three egrets ...

a shower

of white fire!

Even half-asleep they had

such faith in the world

that had made them ...

tilting through the water,

unruffled, sure,

by the laws

of their faith not logic,

they opened their wings

softly and stepped

over every dark thing.

Glendoher, 14 January

The goldfinches have finally returned to Glendoher. Last year when we put the nyjer seeds out, by some magical communication system known only to birds, goldfinches, which rarely grace our garden, turned up within a day, and feasted on the seeds for a week, three and four at a time perched on the feeder. This winter we hung the feeder out again in November, but except for one visit by one bird, we saw no goldfinches at all until last week. As if they have just arrived in the neighbourhood, three pairs have been constantly coming to the feeder, with three queuing in the Himalayan birch tree while the other three feed. It is such a joy to see such bright colours against the garden’s drab background, but it is impossible to fully appreciate the wonderful plumage of the male goldfinch unless you see it up close, through binoculars.

With the goldfinch feeding on the nyjer seed this year is the tiny pink-capped redpoll; five of these little beauties, an unusual, odd number, have been coming for the last two days. The redpolls are particularly covetous birds, constantly fighting with one another in intricate and fast aerial combats for a place on the feeder; though there is enough space to take four of these tiny ruffians, rarely will those feeding put up with more than three. Birdwatch Ireland says that the redpoll is ‘a widespread breeding species, mainly in upland areas’, but although I spend a lot of time in our nearby ‘upland areas’, I have never once seen a redpoll there. Maybe it is because they usually breed in coniferous plantations, and although one will often hear the twittering of the birds that frequent conifers, it is always difficult to see them. In winter, and particularly when food becomes scarce in the coniferous plantations, redpolls come down to the lowlands seeking a variety of seeds, and nyjer seeds seem to be a favourite.

Glendoher, 15 January

When the temperature drops and frost appears, the number of bird species frequenting our garden seems to increase. I was surprised one morning, with the temperature below zero, to see tiny goldcrests and siskins in the conifers behind the wall, and later in the morning an amazing flock of about sixty to seventy goldfinches flying over the field, east to west. I hoped they would wheel and come back to our feeder, but they continued to swoop along, their gay colours brightly reflecting the sun, to the tall trees at the west of the field. They stayed there for ten or fifteen minutes, busily moving about and feeding in the upper branches. Only when a visiting seagull flew too close did they move on, flowing across to a neighbouring tree. About two dozen came to the tall conifer at the eastern end of the field and dropped down to perch in the fronds; they were beautiful to see, the low morning sun picking up their light- coloured undersides as they hung upside down to get at choice titbits. Then a magpie came chattering past and set them off again, westward ho!

Sometimes goldfinches one by one will drop

From low hung branches; little space they stop;

But sip, and twitter, and their feathers sleek;

Then off at once, as in a wanton freak:

Or, perhaps, to show their black, and golden wings,

Pausing upon their yellow flutterings.

– John Keats, ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’

January will often bring other interesting visitors to our garden, including blackcap pairs, greenfinches and redwings, those small thrushes that are visitors from Iceland and Scandinavia, a mere 1,500 kilometres away to the north-west and north-east. Looking out the back window for about five minutes at dusk one frosty evening, I was lucky enough to see a large flock of redwings heading from the Spinney in the direction of St Enda’s Park, where they will roost in the middle of one of the extensive lawns. I did a rapid count which came to more than 250 birds.

A pair of bullfinches turn up every year and spend some time stripping the new growth from the cherry tree. These birds have plumage that belongs to the tropics, but because of their shyness, they are not easily seen close up. The male is dolled up in a shocking red/pink and wears a jet-black cap, while the female is a more refined sandy brown. Just one pair seems to visit us, and we always see them together.

The winter in these parts often brings long, bitterly cold spells followed by high winds and rain. Our local everyday birds, coal tits, blue tits and great tits, appear at the bird table when conditions allow, tirelessly ferrying nuts and seeds away to some cozy den in the hedges, but I suspect that winter takes its tithes, and that the cold wipes out quite a lot of the small birds. The dunnocks, as usual, act in a frisky manner in the poplar tree; they always seem to start the mating season early. With their reputation it would not surprise me.

Ticknock, 16 January

The last three days have been dark, dull and depressing, and there was no ‘pull’ from the outside, and anyway I had a lot of work to do. Today, however, I headed for Ticknock for a stroll after lunch. I was surprised to find that the snow still lay on the hill, quite thickly, more than a week after the last fall. It was very pleasant to crunch along the familiar path. An eerie yellowish glow illuminated the mountains to the west, contrasting with the black of the forest fringe and the dull white of Glendhu. To the north, the Mournes, catching the low afternoon sun, were like a golden-pink mirage on the horizon, their western flanks a series of watercolour-like brushstrokes that glowed below a dark, Paine’s grey sky. At the Fairy Castle I paused a while to soak up the life-giving view.

On my way downhill, I disturbed a liquid cloud of redwings foraging noisily amongst the crinkly beech leaves on the woodland floor; there must have been a hundred in the flock. They swooped up into an ash tree, and just like a Tunnicliffe painting, all perched facing the same way, feathers fluffed up. A bedraggled dunnock did a trapeze act in a pile of branches beside the track, uncharacteristically unconcerned at my proximity. It is glorious how wonderfully well one feels after forty minutes of strenuous walking, especially after the worst of the climbing is over. I arrived back at the car ten feet tall, with great swinging strides, the world at my feet!

Glendoher, 20 January

Brushing my teeth in the bathroom this morning, I glanced down into the garden to see two foxes mating on the grass under the birch tree. I raced down to get the camera, and by the time I returned they had finished the ‘vigorous’ stuff and were standing, bottom to bottom, tails intertwined. The female was facing me looking very relaxed, blinking contentedly, but the male was agitated. It was a case of being unable to withdraw! They remained there as I opened the window and started to take photographs, and the male, looking over his shoulder, looked at me as if to say ‘Do you mind?’ They stood there in this strange stance, clearly waiting for the remains of their passion to subside for a few minutes, with me clicking away, when the back door opened next door. This broke the spell: they tried to make a dash for it, but they were still connected! They ran, almost in circles, like some strange Martian eight-legged creature, for enough time for me to get off two more shots before they finally came apart, one leaping over the back wall and the other the side wall.

I’ve been hearing them almost every night, varying from the awful scream of the vixen to a chucking sound like birds in a bush, and I have spotted them individually around the garden and the front, but this was an unusual sight!