Of Birds; Listed, 'Late' and Laying

When we lived in the UK we took part every year in the British RSPB "Big Garden Bird-Watch" which is a survey of garden birds by members of the public which takes place on a single weekend in January. Tens of thousands of people take part, spending an hour on one of the days bird watching in their garden and then recording what is the highest number of any species seen at any one time during the hour. They either post off their results recorded on a form, or can go on line and enter their data into the web survey. It has been running for many years now and is starting to show some interesting trends up or down in bird populations.


We had a good wildlife garden and used to feed the birds a variety of food all through the year so our scores were generally in ones and twos of all the 'usual suspects' - blue and great tits, blackbirds, greenfinches, dunnocks, a robin or wren if you were lucky and, very reliably, between 30 and 77 house sparrows of which we had a huge mob all the time in our holly bushes, beech hedge and trees and shrubs. If we were lucky our resident female sparrow hawk would nip through while we were on watch. Either way we had a pretty good idea of what our garden population was like.

When we moved here we were delighted by some of the differences in what we could describe as 'usual suspects'. The house sparrows are replaced here by a mob of around 17 chaffinches who gather up any poultry food left by the hens. We have never seen a house sparrow yet. Robins and wrens are ten a penny. Our 'crows' are the grey bodied Hooded Crow; UK-style black Carrion Crows being almost entirely absent from Ireland. We also do well for field fares and jackdaws. Coal tits seem to be more common than blue or great tits.

Also different is the 'peoples' survey'. Not for us the easy life of one hour on one day of a fixed weekend. The Irish version, run by Bird Watch Ireland involves keeping your eyes open for 13 weeks from early December through to the end of February and scoring the biggest number of each species you see at any point during that week. This is good for we out-door types, as I can 'watch' while I'm allotmenting or out round the ground with dogs. Liz and I have conversations where we are basically 'auctioning' the results in a series of bids. Liz saw 17 field fares today, for example, which meant I had to go into the website and up my previous record (4). It has a few minor frustrations mind - we wish we could have recorded the hen harrier who flaps lazily up the valley but never came into our 'airspace', or the kingfisher zipping up the River Lung from Feigh Bridge (again - not actually IN the garden). We get regular mobs of long-tailed tits through, too, but they have stayed away while I have been 'surveying'.

A quick warning for those readers who do not want to know about the 'meat-preparation' side of small holdings; Look Away Now (3 paragraphs). The 'Late' birds? That will be the young roosters hatched 17 weeks ago today by Broody Betty. It's been great to see it all happen and to nurture them up through babyhood and into adolescence but they turned out to be male and were starting to square up to each other, tried their hand at crowing and even tried to mount the hens. William the Conqueror was getting fed up with them and it was all getting a bit feisty. The hens would shrug them off but then turn round and attack them quite viciously. Someone was going to get badly hurt or even, if William got them cornered, killed. William is twice their size. I had offered them to anyone on the poultry forums but those guys are mainly breeders of pure fancy-fowl and a hybrid x hybrid of dubious parentage is of no use to them. The boys' times had come.

Dispatching them is my job, and Liz has volunteered for the role of plucker. I managed to grab one yesterday when it foolishly preceded me into the confined space of the goose house but the other one was having nothing to do with that. The advice in that case is to set the alarm for 'while it's still dark' and pay the hen house a visit while nobody can see to fly off and escape. Rooster 2 was therefore waiting his turn in the pluckery by the time Liz got up. Liz has tried 2 methods now and prefers the 2nd - the first was just to dry-pluck holding the bird half inside a dustbin liner - the 2nd involved dipping the bird in hot water for 5 seconds and then wet-plucking. The feathers come away easier but the wet feathers stick to your hands and to the bird so "at times it was a bit difficult to see where I'd been" said Liz.

Anyway, the two brothers are plucked, cleaned and in the freezer now, awaiting their turn to be made into coq-au-vin. Interestingly for 2 brothers, clutch mates and equal age young "roos", they were hugely different in carcass weights - one was 1193 g cleaned weight, the other 1833 g. They may, of course, have had different mothers - no end of hens were happily contributing to BB's clutch! Their livers, hearts and gizzards, sliced up and briefly fried off have featured in tonight's tapas style supper. Delicious.

And finally, we have found another secret egg stash left by Wandering Wendy when she doesn't feel like laying in the official nest boxes. We had seen her nipping into the goose house looking a bit guilty. The rabbit 'Maternity Unit' is in there, though currently empty and she had discovered that she could sneak in (yellow arrow) through a hole at the right hand end and nip along 5 feet or so, well out of sight (yellow cross). I only found these (7) eggs by squeezing my head round the gap and using a torch. I had to prise off one of the planks to extract the eggs. That was yesterday. Today I blocked up the hole and two (it turned out) hens were very loud in their complaints and hung around the hutches, even jumping up into them through the open doors and marching around inside as if looking for the nest site.

The picture here shows the hutches not yet complete, with no mesh. They now do have proper fronts with a hinged mesh panel. I decided that if I left the mesh door open and put some hay in the 'bedroom' they might use that. At least I'd know where the eggs would be instead of having to hunt under hedges, track WW across the fields or find an egg at random in the yard, outside the front door, on the drive or what ever. To my surprise two hens laid in the hutch (and nobody laid in the nest boxes) today. There is time, I think, for one final bit of egg-laying related tomfoolery. Yesterday Liz and I paused outside the back door to watch the hens pecking at some wheat I had thrown down in the yard, amused, as ever by their antics. Suddenly we both heard a "tick!" and, as the forest of legs parted we could see an egg on the ground right where they were pecking. As far as either of us could see no hen had actually stopped pecking at the seed, so they must be able to multi-task, pecking with one end while the other end pumps out an egg. They come out (we did not know) pointy-end first and we know this because the 'tick' noise we had heard was the shell getting broken slightly at that end where it hit the gravel and concrete of the yard. So now you know.

The Only Way is Up

Who even knew there was a 'right way up' for eggs? Apparently there is, and it is 'pointy end down' so all my pictures of eggs so far have been wrong 'uns. It just looks so wrong and pointy end up looks right. However, it all has to do, apparently, with the air sac of the egg being at the blunt end. If you put this end down the sac tends to bulge up into the egg and the yolk will sag on its suspension strands within the white. White contains a lot more protective enzymes than yolk, it seems, and if you do this you can get a lot more shelf life out of the egg - up to 5 months if you need it, though our eggs would never last that long around here. All the commercial boys do this and modern egg packing gear lifts the 6 eggs using rubber suction cups by their blunt end, so egg boxes from the shops are all this way up, if you look. Ah well. Now I know (Thank You, Mentor Anne) as from the 3rd January I will toe the line.

Recent days have also seen John Deere Bob and I out with the chainsaw and tractor again and attacking the local ash trees. First up, though, an appointment at Bob's where in his own barn, he has left from a big load of wood, just the gnarly bottom-of-tree bits which resist his axe. He's an old boy, 70+ and even so can still swing that axe impressively, but these bits have knots and scar ("spelted?") tissue and the axe is no use. The chain saw, though, doesn't take any prisoners and we soon have these great discs and cubes of iron-hard wood reduced to breeze-block size and smaller, to fit in his fireplace. From there he sends me off for a couple hours felling and logging coppiced ash in the warm sunshine till we have enough for 2 loads in his tractor-mounted box, saying he'll come down later to load it. That amount of logs quickly fills up all the spare space in the log shed and the space underneath and even bulges out into the rain. Should see us through to the good weather.

Still not satisfied, though, Bob now has his eye on a decent sized (not yet coppiced) ash on the boundary of his field. To me this tree looks too big for my chain saw but Bob is convinced we'll be OK if we just cut in twice, once from either side on the thick bits (!). The amount of wood would fill, again, my wood store over , so we will have to move some stuff in the Tígín and make space for a big stack under cover ready for 2013/4 winter. Probably not needed quite yet but, as Sparks kept saying, "Better to be looking at it than looking for it" and Bob seems to be on a roll, enjoying himself as an active logger with me as his new 'oppo'. Fair play to him.

The two cats, brothers and litter mates have grown, at 7 months into 2 quite different animals. On the left here, with white paws is sleek farm-cat Rolo, ace mouser and ratter (not so many lately - they seem to have wiped the local vermin out!). He is given to odd chirrupy "Prr-r-r-ooooo!" noises and sitting in the kitchen sink (when empty of water). His brother, Blue of the enormous grey feet is roughly the same weight (3.65 kg) but less of a vermin-killer and given to loud yowling when he wants a door opened. Also to quite manic demands for fuss where he will scramble to get onto your shoulders or lap or onto the laptop keyboard and start mouthing or patting your hands and face if you do not give him the petting, strokes and love he thinks are his right.

Our home made Merlot wine turns out to be a very pleasant, light, easy drink. It is not 'thin' in the alcohol sense and gives you the same buzz as would a shop-bought Merlot, but it is not heavy in dense flavours like a Rioja or a Shiraz might be. It is more like the top end of rosé so we have been trying out drinking it as would Diamond and Liz on their Greek holidays. They are used to the Greek red house-wine being chilled (which probably only works for the rosé end of things) but on Poros Island each customer would get a 0.25 cl carafe of the house red and any kind of tumbler or glass. These are rough and ready sea-front tavernas, not 'posh restaurants' and Diamond, having been going to Poros for a gazillion years knows all the taverna owners and is welcomed in with open arms like a member of the family. She is given the genuine stuff, not the tourist baloney. We are currently working our way through the 'overflow' wine which got put into 2 litre milk bottles when we ran out of wine bottles and corks, so the bottle sits in the fridge and comes out periodically to refill the carafe. The carafe is a genuine Greek one from just such an old taverna as described here (though this one up in the lemon groves at Lemonodassos); a present to Liz from the owner, Andreas.

My final picture is firmly back in the category of "Look away Now" if you don't want to know about the fates of last year's store-lambs, Connie, Dora and Flo. 4 more delicious chops from the freezer. We have over 20 of these 4-pack chop packs across the three carcasses and they are superb, and very nice with this Greek-style wine drinking. Liz blasts them in the griddle-pan with some salt tossed into the pan first, and serves them on warmed plates with whatever veg and carbs are around - yesterday it was quinoa, cabbage and carrots.