When should you feed birds in your garden? All year round, say the wise and compassionate ones. Other people object. In nestling time, a mother bird might feed a peanut to one of her young and choke it to death. The answer to this is that birds have more sense. Besides, while the parent birds work hard to feed to the nestling the caterpillars or other seasonal insects, they may not have time to go hunting for themselves, so the always-stocked bird feeder keeps them fed.
These thoughts come from a most interesting survey carried out by those indefatigable observers in Birdwatch Ireland. In their winter garden bird survey of 1996/7 they achieved 309 correspondents answering. Many found that birds were scarcer than usual last winter. In general, resident species show little change but migrants turn in much greater variation.
Naturally birds come to your food table in greater numbers after the food in the hedges and trees (berries and nuts), has been depleted. So December and January sees your feeders and bird tables most frequented, and then comes a gradual decline. Why?, you might wonder. There's not any more wild food around at that time. The answer, unfortunately, is that mortality takes over in hard weather; or rather one answer, for it might be that the birds begin to disperse to their breeding territories.
Cold weather, of course, brings sudden influxes of such birds as fieldfares and redwings. And perhaps, the survey adds, song thrushes and starlings may also come in from the Continent. Only three counties did not have a contribution to make, but 309 is not bad. The magazine shows a table giving the percentage of gardens in which each species occurred in 1996/7 and the two years before. Taking only the latest, the first four are robin, blue tit, blackbird and chaffinch with from 98 per cent down to 94 per cent. Then come greenfinch, great tit, house sparrow, dunnock, magpie and coal tit, descending from 89 per cent for the first to 75 per cent to the coal tit (individually, a Co Meath garden swarms with coal tits beyond any other bird). Wren comes in sixteenth place, redwing and fieldfare at, respectively, 31 per cent and 13 per cent. In all, 60 species are covered.
Birdwatch Ireland, 8 Longford Place, Monkstown, Co Dublin. Join them and give membership as a Christmas present.