An end to peanut riots

SINCE the air warmed up and softened and the midges are making a dancing cloud around the garden tap (just to annoy me), the morning peanut-riot outside my study window has been calming down, as the birds go back to nature for their nourishment.

Last to quit the junk food, probably, will be the blue-tits, which is one good reason not to replenish the feeder. Books say the tits feed nut fragments to their nestlings, which can't digest them. That sounds like one of the things we greens dream up to worry about. But it makes no sense, anyway, to go on feeding peanuts just to watch bird acrobatics.

That's all it is - don't kid yourselves you're making any difference, except in a welfare sense. With 10 babies a year a pair as a hedge against hard winters, there would be just as many blue-tits in the world without peanuts: just a lot fewer hanging around back-gardens.

The nuts can bring lovely surprises, all the same. One day last week, two new kinds of finch arrived to squabble over the feeder - siskins and goldfinches, technicolor-bright in their flashes of yellow and red. The resident robin, chaffinches and sparrows backed off - even the blue tits, beaks clearly out of joint. Only the male of our nesting great tits, flashing his black belly-stripe like a mayoral sash, pushed the strangers aside.

Neither siskin nor goldfinch is especially rare (siskins, pictured here, now turn up by the half-dozen on some midland bird-trays' in winter), but for a pair of each to arrive in the breeding, season was bound to lift the heart.

"Let me show you where to nest!" - the thought leaped up, as they say, unbidden. Our acre is now just about leafy enough, with dense clumps of larch and spruce, alder and willow inside the hawthorn hedge, to start attracting new species (last year, sedge-warblers). So I have been seizing on any glimpse of siskin or goldfinch at the nuts as some confirmation of intent.

And today, wheeling garden tools in the barrow, I waited under the elder bush for the cock goldfinch to finish his song on the highest twig above my head.

This cheerful, optimistic twittering, as well the glamorous plumage, was why the goldfinch was trapped in such numbers as a cage-bird. At one location the coast of Sussex, on the goldfinches' main migration route between Britain and Iberia, estimated 132,000 birds a year were being trapped in the 1860s. In Ireland, it was an export trade: 300 bird-catchers were still at work as the Protection of Wild Birds Act of 1930 was being debated. They smeared bushes with treacly birdlime, made from holly berries, and used captive finches as decoys to call the wild birds down.

The cock goldfinch's song is also, it seems, a potent turn-on for the female, attracting and prompting her to a shameless soliciting of sex, and even helping to stimulate the onset of her ovulation. That joyous solo from the elder bush is about mating, not territory.

At first thought, neither goldfinches nor siskins are likely to nest as just one pair in a garden, however rambling and leafy. Both are so-called cardueline finches, as distinct from fringilline finches like the chaffinch. Chaffinches do, of course, breed commonly in gardens, the cocks spacing themselves out to defend a territory of perhaps several thousand square metres. They also eat many insects as well as seeds.

The cardueline finches are specialised seed-eaters, able to tweezer the food out of cones and thistles. Most of them breed in loose colonies - sometimes goldfinches and siskins together, high up in a grove of conifers. But the bare coast of Connacht can suggest its own compromises: Richard Ussher, a century ago, found goldfinches the commonest finch in west Donegal and nesting "in gooseberry bushes and elsewhere in gardens, and in elder and hawthorn hedges". So I'm hopeful, still.

The spread of the siskins, and the changing behaviour that has brought them to notice - fairly recently, for most people - is an interesting phenomenon. Historically, the birds' breeding stronghold in these islands was in the old, post-glacial woodlands of Scots pine. This tree died out as a native in Ireland, for reasons unknown, about 1,500 years ago, but it survived in the forests of northeast Scotland - the siskins, too.

Until the Big House estates began replanting Scots pine early last century, siskins had virtually vanished from Ireland. But by 1900 they were well established again as the island's hardiest finch, laying eggs as early as April. The spread of conifer plantations on both islands built up the siskin populations - to about 60,000 pairs in Ireland.

As a bird of the dense spruce-woods, raising its young among the highest branches, the siskin was all but invisible. Even on its winter forays to the cones of alder trees, it was a relatively unfamiliar bird. But then suddenly, in the early 1960s, siskins in Britain began visiting garden bird-tables in winter, and to concentrate, increasingly, on the peanut-bag. It was a piece of "instant" adaptation, rather like the blue-tits learning, all at once, to peel back the caps of milk bottles left on doorsteps.

SISKINS are now an exuberant addition to the Irish rural landscape, even if, as a rule, they fly off rapidly in spring, to breed in the plantations, where they feed their young on well-munched and regurgitated spruce seeds. Few of us may actually get to feel, with Richard Ussher that in the breeding-time the siskin is the most joyous of birds, seeming to bound through the air with a cry of delight, and to proclaim its feelings by every note and movement". But as my Sitkas mature and start bearing seeds, I can still hope.