A bird in the hand must be handled ever so gently

ANOTHER LIFE: WHEN TALKING to a robin in the garden in spring — as one does — it might enrich the conversation to know if the bird pecking up grubs almost from under one's spade is cock or hen.

The plumage of both sexes is indistinguishable and both gather food for chicks. Male and female sing indistinguishably (though after pairing, it’s mostly the male defending the territory). A quick glimpse of either robin courtship or aggression can look a lot the same, and both sexes get into fights. Only when the cock feeds the hen in spring betrothal, or mounts her to mate, is gender indisputably clear.

Such bird-watching problems with robins in his Co Fermanagh garden came to preoccupy James Parsons Burkitt, who died 50 years ago last week. As a first-class honours graduate in mathematics and engineering from Queen’s College, Galway, and Fermanagh County Surveyor for 40 years, he came equipped with the right sort of mind. By trapping robins under an old gauze meat-cover propped up with a stick and fitting them with home-made leg rings of different sorts, he could tell one bird from another on any day in the year.

Thus, in the winter of 1922, as the rest of Ireland still seethed with civil-war politics, Burkitt was devising the essential tool of modern ornithology. Today, more than 2,000 trained ringers, most of them amateur volunteers, ring some 800,000 birds of all kinds each year in Ireland and Britain alone. The device is key to almost everything we know about bird populations, migrations and behaviour.

In the garden, fields and hedges around Lawnakilla, a house perched among drumlins, Burkitt ringed up to 100 robins — discovering, for example, that few lived longer than four years (though one reached the age of 11) and that hen birds sang. His was the first population study of any bird, and his explorations of territorial behaviour, described in various journals, were revelatory.

He was able to mark out the “estates” — as he called the territories — of nesting robins in some 24 acres around Lawnakilla, which “seems to be a fact entirely unknown to ornithologists”, as Charles Nelson says.

Dr Nelson is best known in Ireland for his writings on the island's plant life and botanical history, but family connections with Burkitt made him keen to install his story in Archives of Natural History, published currently by the UK's Society for the History of Natural History (not quite the tautology it might sound).

Burkitt has been well-thanked by ornithologists, not least by the late and eminent David Lack, whose book The Life of the Robinoriginally published in 1943, is a well-reprinted classic. "A religious, humble and able man," wrote Lack, "[Burkitt] was immensely surprised at the great interest which his researches evoked, and he spent his declining years reading his Bible and cultivating his garden." Burkitt once wrote to Lack: "When I was doing the robin, I had pricks of conscience that I was really more interested in the created than the Creator."

The skill and gentleness involved in ringing birds has to be watched up close to appreciate the need for training, long directed and licensed in these islands by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). A robin must be held in cupped palm at just the right pressure, tiny head wedged softly between two fingers, while pliers deftly close the ring on a leg no thicker than a matchstick. Most birds are caught in nets at night, dropping into pockets of mesh as fine as hairnets. Disentangling and retrieving them without bending a wing-feather, all by the light of a head-lamp, is a delicate art in itself.

As sometime pole-carrier, bag-holder and general gooseherd to David Cabot, in his 40-year study of the 2,000-odd barnacle geese that winter on Mayo’s Inishkea Islands, I once helped him to corral 600 geese (flightless, because they were moulting their wing-feathers) on their breeding grounds in Greenland. Weighing and ringing each bird with a coded plastic anklet was a task continued far into the midnight sun.

Dr Cabot’s remarkable study will have enriched his new book on wildfowl, soon to be published in HarperCollins’ expert New Naturalist series. And the BTO’s ringing programmes are essential to monitoring their survival among so many threats, and the success of conservation.

The lightweight leg rings are no more a handicap to birds, says the BTO, than carrying a mobile phone is to us. But I remain sorry that quite so many thousands (millions?) of birds have to fly around with human identity cards on their shins. Long may my anonymous robins enjoy their unmonitored lives.

EYE ON NATURE:

Having moved to a new garden recently, I have discovered numerous flat worms from a half-inch to two inches in length, orange/pink in colour and found under stones and slabs. Are they another imported pest?Mike Simpson, Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow

I’m afraid that you have got the Australian flatworm, just as pernicious as the New Zealand species. Get rid of them by weighing down plastic sacks in damp areas. Destroy the worms by burning, squashing or immersing in salty water. And crush the blackcurrant-like eggs.

We had a visit from an all white female pheasant in our rural garden. Is this unusual? I saw an enormous flock of starlings at 6.30pm, the sky was black with them.Vivienne Doyle, Belmont, Co Offaly

Albinism occurs in pheasants, but some fanciers breed white pheasants and it might have been an escape. The starlings must have a good feeding area not too far away, and a good roosting area nearby.

We had planned to drain our garden pond and divide the plants. However large areas of frogspawn appeared in it in mid-March. How long will we have to wait before tackling the pond?Vi Wilson, Mount Merrion, Co Dublin.

Until the froglets leave in mid-summer.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.