I still miss the rooks from the sycamores down the hill. As spring grew busy, I could peer down through binoculars as if into a Neolithic village, the circle of nests like thatched huts in the turf smoke from the farmhouse chimney.
The rooks were never blacker and glossier, and their evening roosting flight a grand, wheeling procession against the ocean sunset. But rooks in the treetops make undeniably noisy neighbours, their constant clamour of dissension and complaint, from daybreak onwards, a trial to human tranquillity. Their droppings, too, are profuse and indiscriminate. As numbers grow in a colony, from year to year the temptation to evict must occasionally be overwhelming.
So the sycamores are quiet and empty these days, but Ireland in general is still very tolerant of rooks, no longer bothering even to shoot them for a pie. Those in the North actually doubled in the late 1990s, and Co Derry has the highest density of nesting rooks in these islands. Further south, a 1980s count of rooks breeding in 100 square kilometres of Co Kildare found 66 rookeries with close on 5,000 nests.
Now, the Countryside Bird Survey Report, just published by BirdWatch Ireland, confirms the rook as the most abundant breeding bird in the Republic. Most of the areas surveyed by BirdWatch Ireland volunteers and Dúchas's conservation rangers were on farmland, with a much denser coverage in the east, and rooks were nesting in 80 per cent of them.
The total count - 12,284 - doesn't mean much in an island-wide rook population estimated at some 520,000 pairs, but it hugely outnumbers the total of wrens that were counted - 4,388 - even though the wren emerged as the Republic's most widespread bird, nesting almost everywhere.
The first three seasons of the survey could do no more than set a reliable baseline on the numbers and distribution of our countryside birds - trends will appear as the same one-kilometre squares are monitored year by year. There are still plenty of vacant squares waiting for moderately experienced observers, especially away from the eastern region.
The survey is a milestone in Irish ornithology. Unlike the UK, which has 30 years of the Common Bird Census to draw on, there has been no real population-monitoring programme in the Republic. Now the 320-odd survey squares will complement the 100 or so being monitored by volunteers in the North, organised through a partnership of conservation agencies and bird organisations such as the RSPB.
Besides the striking increase in the North's rooks (and hooded crows) between 1994 and 1999, the news about many of the countryside's songbirds seemed good - a remarkable 174 per cent surge in hedgerow dunnocks, for example, a doubling of goldcrests, handsome rises in chaffinches, great tits, wrens, and even 30 per cent more meadow pipits, a key species for the uplands. Mistle thrushes and house-sparrows, on the other hand, showed big declines.
Weather can produce big year-to-year swings in populations of small birds, and it takes perhaps a decade of monitoring to test the real trends. But even at the start, the Republic's Countryside Bird Survey has confirmed significant declines. The yellowhammer, for example, once a widespread songbird in the hedgerows of the west, has withdrawn to the grain-growing regions of the east and south. The meadow pipit, on the other hand, a common bird of rough grassland and bog, shuns the rye-grass pastures of intensive cattle farmland.
The survey also brings home the difference in bird numbers and diversity a complexity of habitats can give. On one steep upland square of blanket bog, the only bird was the meadow pipit. But in one square of Co Kilkenny, lowland farmland with deciduous woodland, water-meadow and a wide river with plenty of bank vegetation, no fewer than 48 species of birds were breeding.
It was from that same county, last week, that I received an anguished e-mail. On the outskirts of Kilkenny, it seems, a developer wants to remove an entire hedgerow from the front of his site, along with its trees - a stretch of 35 metres, three metres deep, with ash trees, wild cherry, alder and hawthorn. In any enlightened planning, such a hedge would be valued as a screen against traffic noise and pollution, a shelter against wind and weather and a living amenity enjoyed by wildlife and people. Its retention should actually be a selling point.
As destruction of roadside hedgerows accelerates, a new and vital initiative, called Networks for Nature, will be launched next month by the Irish Wildlife Trust, Crann and the Heritage Council.
The Irish Wildlife Trust commissioned the last national hedgerow survey, in 1987, which found that some 16 per cent of hedgerows had been lost in the previous half-century. The current rate of loss must be quite dramatic, and an up-to-date, expert survey is a priority for the new partnership.
Other steps in a five-year workplan involve better training for the farm advisers used in the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS), proper training and certification for the hedgerow contractors, and workshops for local authority engineers and planners. An invited conference in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, on April 10th will recruit a steering group from the many stakeholders, including agricultural interests and those involved in rural development. Meanwhile, the new Wildlife Act ban on hedge-cutting from March 1st, to protect nesting birds, has, it seems, been widely ignored: enforcement is the rub. "Nothing has changed," concludes the Irish Wildlife Trust, as it heads into the long haul of "collaborative" action.
- Contact Dick Coombes at BirdWatch Ireland, 8 Longford Place, Monkstown, Co Dublin, or visit www.networksfornature.com