Dublin Dossier

Blue Tit

Starling

Older friends, all dear to me, meanwhile, are on the wane for a variety of reasons. The eerie screech of swifts on warm evenings, racing between buildings and climbing ever-higher to their aerial roosts was once part of the music of summer. Partly due to a lamentable improvement in building standards, robbing swifts of the nooks, crannies and gaps they build their nests in; partly to the spectacular drop in airborne insect life that has made summer driving a far less splatty experience than it once was, but from a swift’s point of view making it a leaner season - and less rewarding of the huge migrations they make from sub-Saharan Africa to breed here.

Other declines are less easily explained; sometimes they are part of processes we as humans can take neither blame nor credit for. After all, the ‘purpose’ of evolution and adaptation is to thrive, and where resources are finite that will almost inevitably mean doing so at someone else’s expense, one species displacing another. What we rather accusingly label an ‘invasive species’ is usually one we have in effect given a lift to. Parakeets survive in Northern Europe because they are equipped to; the only thing stopping them before now was the journey; they’re not long-distance travellers. Perhaps, looking back, we’ll come to regard the process as a form of parasitism or symbiosis.

Our agency in wildlife demographics isn’t always malign; the barn owl, one of our best-loved companions in rural environments, has become almost entirely dependent on human structures for nesting. It’s already a hugely successful species, with a global range that excludes only Antarctica - and in many parts of the world it is far less dependent on us; but in Europe it’s synonymous with farmland. Feeding almost exclusively on small mammals, it’s traditionally seen as an ally in the farmer’s unceasing war on rodents.

It’s in the garden, though, that birds and humans share their closest and most easily enjoyed relationship - and the one that brings birds closest to our hearts. The incredible variety of foods, shelter and niches created by our efforts to cultivate the urban jungle have brought dozens of species to our back doors, sometimes literally - and with them, a feast of life, colour and music that speaks to some appetite we might otherwise scarcely know we had. From dawn to dusk on a winter’s day, will anything more beautiful or uplifting than a blue tit cross our paths? Personally, I think not. And behind that blue tit at the bird table comes a day-long procession of beguiling co-stars: the longer you wait, the more you will see, until finally something you have never seen before comes visiting. You hold your breath for fear of scaring this gift away, and wonder whether you just haven’t been paying enough attention before now. And somehow, once recognised, the newcomer is always there - as it probably always was.

For every vanished corncrake we lament, there are garden birds we scarcely notice as they come and go. The ubiquitous house sparrow, whose numbers are greatly reduced in recent years, and whose chirping is as much part of the urban soundscape as traffic noise, may one day fall silent before we truly know what is behind its decline. These are short-lived creatures, and can vanish almost before our eyes, so the work of organisations like Birdwatch Ireland in monitoring and collating data on their populations, while far from our stereotypes of birdwatchers, is as vital a contribution to our own welfare as the big-ticket environmental campaigns around climate change. We could save the planet but still lose the birds, perhaps simply for the want of realising that they are here to be lost.

From the most ordinary of days, there are moments you just don’t forget; a buzzard mobbed by rooks, high above Heuston Station in Dublin; a cloud of waxwings in a birch tree barely yards from St Stephen’s Green; the first time I saw a kingfisher on the Dodder; any time I see a kingfisher. The day I arrived in Dublin from London in 1992, when The Irish Times carried a photo of a nesting pair of peregrines on the old gasometer on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. Except perhaps for the waxwings, nothing exceptional, just memorable. And as I said - free.

Waxwing