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;
