Another Life:The American clock we keep in the loo emits bird calls on the hour, sometimes to the great alarm of visitors who might creep down there in the night (it only works then if the light's on), writes Michael Viney.
The mockingbird giving forth harsh reproaches in the silence of 2am can be unnerving. A better choice for that time might have been the hollow and hopeless, but less immediately rousing, who-ooh, who-who-who of the mourning dove that launches the day at 7am.
At the start of the month, one of these small, brown pigeons, the common native dove of the eastern US, was seen pecking up seeds on one of the narrow roads of Inishbofin, the island on my horizon. It took a visiting birder, Anthony McGeehan, to get over his amazement and on to his mobile, whereupon a small army of twitchers (some 44 in all) began arriving on the island ferry, wielding telescopes, tripods and cameras. The dove obligingly stayed put until everyone got his shot (it is a predominantly male and convivial legion).
This was already a marvellous autumn for vagrants from all directions.
October's roster included Ireland's first Blyth's reed warbler, from somewhere far to the east (even Pakistan, where it breeds) that alighted on Mizen Head in Co Cork. Mourning doves make only short retreats southwards in winter and don't really offer themselves to being whisked across to Ireland in an Atlantic gale. But a second one did turn up at around the same time on North Uist in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, where it attracted some 280 observers. This could suggest a genuine windfall, as it were, or simply that two mourning doves took a hitch on a container-ship and, nearing land, flew sad and separate ways.
Their wings make a whistling sound when they take off, a refinement on the clatter of a rising flock of woodpigeons, our own most common and widespread species of Columbidae. These now constitute the largest biomass of any bird in Ireland or Britain (where the end-of-breeding total is now around 10 million). Indeed, they seem to be getting physically bigger in Ireland, if not actually obese.
For this revelation I thank Daire Ó hUallacháin, a Teagasc researcher who did his PhD on woodpigeons, and Jimmy Dunne, the NUI Galway zoologist who taught him, writing together in the latest Tearmann, the Irish journal of agri-environmental research. One big reason for their interest in woodpigeon body mass is that, in Britain, the bird has become "the most important factor in driving farmers out of oilseed rape" - the crop that will turn much of Ireland yellow as the staple of biofuel production.
To sample the weight of the pigeons and compare it with previous research, a total of 299 adults - you'd have thought they would have waited for just one more bird - were shot at random over three years, mostly over decoys in barley stubble fields in Co Louth, along with others shot as they were coming home to roost in woodland. The birds' crops were emptied out to give their body weights a level barley field, as it were.
The previous studies all dated to the mid-1900s, before intensive farming. This not only doubled the average yield of grain per hectare, offering the pigeons an even denser standing crop, but often spills more grain on the ground than was left in the old stubble fields. In Britain, the arrival of oilseed rape in the 1970s filled the pigeons' "hungry gap" of winter when they used to survive - or not - on less-nutritious clover.
Ireland's woodpigeons have so far had far less rapeseed on offer, but are still, on average, about 2 per cent heavier than they were in Britain in the mid-1900s. An extra 16g of fat (the top gain) in the half-kilo of an average pigeon may not seem a great deal, but it helps the birds stay warmer in winter, thus keeping more alive to breed in spring.
Woodpigeons are rare on our windy side of the hill. Instead, we have collared doves, regular breeders in a neighbour's conifer shelter-belt and now gone off to join the winter flocks prospecting for grain. Confined a century ago to Turkey and the Balkans, this species then launched on an amazing expansion, reaching Ireland from the 1950s and spreading slowly west.
Did Ireland have no wild doves of her own? The really wild sort are the rock doves in my drawing, taking off to fly with fierce speed and urgency between islands such as Inishbofin, Clare and Inishkea. Now found in pure form only along our oceanic coasts, nesting in caves and crevices and feeding in coastal fields, they are the ancestors of the feral, multi-hued pigeons that waddle city streets.