There are more wrens in Ireland than people. Should that surprise us? Anyway, David Cabot tells us that there are 3 million pairs or there about. A lot of them seemed to be thriving in one particular garden, and you wonder how big the brood has to be. And yet Cabot tells us that the usual clutch of eggs is five or six. How then so many, getting caught in the greenhouse, climbing in and out of the log-pile looking for spiders and so on? Well, the answer may be this.
Our man tells us that the male builds several dome-shaped nests and the female selects one, lines it with feathers and lays her eggs. There are, writes Cabot, usually two clutches a year, and the male, good father that he is, takes the first fledged brood into one of the spare nests while the hen is incubating the second brood. So that's why there are now at least a dozen wrens in this particular garden. Not the smallest of our birds - that distinction belongs to the goldcrest, which weighs only five grams.
And then there are, or were, the Wren Boys. It was not just an Irish custom. England had it too. Marcus Woodward in a book In Na- ture's Ways, largely a commentary on White's Selborne, tells us that the bird was persecuted in England because of "some foolish old legend telling how, in the dark days when the Danes invaded England, a wren picked up a crumb from their camp and then sang so loudly, while they were asleep, that they were awakened, and were ready to meet their Saxon foes who would otherwise have been able to take them unawares."
There were other anti-wren stories, writes Woodward, which were used to justify killing "the wren, the wren, the King of all Birds". And he remarks: "as though to hunt him and catch him was the proper way to treat the King of all Birds."
But there is another reason to be grateful to the wren. While the robin sings through the winter, even with snow on the ground, the wren chimes in on milder winter days, when other birds are silent. Shakespeare, the country boy, mentions the wren in warm terms more than once.
. . . for the poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight -
The young ones in her nest - against the owl.
That's from Macbeth.