Crane your neck to see the birds of heaven return

ANOTHER LIFE:IT'S A BIRD I have largely to imagine, as no photograph does more than freeze a moment in the whole of its glorious life – and any one of these can look a little odd. On the ground, cranes "pace like geriatric generals pondering battle plans" (this from Paddy Woodworth, watching them in Spain). Their courtship dances are a noisy, extravagant, prancing ballet, the great wings spread and beaks tilted absurdly to the sky. Thousands of southern Swedes gather to marvel each spring.

And it's on migration, in lofty, trailing chevrons, long necks stretched ahead to trumpet their contact calls, that they especially fit the title of Peter Matthiessen's classic book on their conservation, The Birds of Heaven.

It was on migration early last month, heading for Mediterranean warmth in France and Spain, that some 70 western European cranes drifted off course on southeasterly winds and, possibly by way of Cornwall, arrived in Ireland. Three flocks flew into Co Cork, some roosting in the harbour near Cork city and others landing inland to feed on harvested maize. Still more ranged on, fanning out across the midlands to the coasts at Dublin and Galway, and a few flew above my oblivious head to hunt earthworms in a rushy pasture at Belderg, near the Céide Fields of north Co Mayo.

So – proper cranes in numbers, not the herons oddly miscalled cranes by many Irish people, 300 years after Grus grusdisappeared from Ireland. Herons are not only far smaller, and fly on their own with their necks tucked in, but aren't even grouped with cranes in the scientific classification of birds, while coots and corncrakes make it, surprisingly, into the same order of Gruiformes.

Such a sizeable influx of the birds, even as a probable accident of weather, contrasts sharply with the usual one or two vagrants (seven at the Wexford Slobs in December 1984) and has fanned the aspirations of those, like Lorcan O’Toole of the Golden Eagle Trust, who long to have the birds return to a big, boggy refuge in the midlands cutaway, not least as a badly needed, mystic lift to the Irish psyche.

That Ireland ever had a great many cranes was doubted for a long time by 19th-century ornithologists, whatever of Giraldus Cambrensis vouching for flocks of 100 in the 1180s. Rather more recently, Gordon D'Arcy included the crane in his Ireland's Lost Birds(1999), having traced plentiful evidence for its former abundance, even in all the place names embodying the Irish word "corr".

He saw their disappearance in the late Middle Ages as resulting not from hunting, disturbance or loss of habitat but possibly as retreat from the harshness of the little ice age.

Although 11 of the world’s 15 species of crane are endangered, the western European crane has been expanding, thanks to conservation and also, perhaps, to climate change. Its numbers trebled in 30 years, to 150,000 in 2001, with a breeding range spreading northwards from Iberia and southern France to Germany and the UK, where the cranes returned, in the 1980s, to their ancient breeding grounds in East Anglia.

Last month’s Irish influx matches up with observations in France, where flocks of cranes migrating from Sweden and Germany were seen unusually far to the west, in Brittany and at the Atlantic coast.

Just as the Continent’s little egret has colonised much of Ireland, the swelling number of European cranes, plus a warming climate, could see a migratory return to breed on the cutaway peatlands of the midland counties.

O'Toole has watched over the successful reintroduction of the golden eagle to Co Donegal and beyond, and, with the Golden Eagle Trust, is urging the creation of a wetlands park, with return of the crane as its charismatic emblem. This puts him in a strong ecological lobby, pioneered by John Feehan of University College Dublin and supported in Bogland, the recent major report on national peatland management.

Bord na Móna’s existing work on rewilding parts of the Co Offaly cutaway have been a good introduction to the art of “restoration ecology”, an international, science-based conservation movement with projects across the world.

Paddy Woodworth, whose book on the subject, Restoring the Future, will be published by Chicago University, visited an extraordinary attempt to save the whooper crane, now among the rarest birds in North America. It involves rearing young birds with minimum human contact (the workers dress up in crane suits) and flying with them in tiny microlight machines to teach them a 2,000km migration route from the US Midwest to Florida, a project costing more than €80,000 per bird.

This is not exactly restoration ecology, which aims to mend the habitat first. Then we can hope that Europe’s magnificent cranes, like Ireland’s woodpeckers and buzzards, will start doing it for themselves.

Eye on nature

Our cat discovered a large spider crossing the kitchen floor and pounced. We rescued the spider but not before it had lost a couple of legs. Having put the spider outside, we returned to find the cat looking in amazement as the two disembodied legs kicked their way across the floor. On the web we learned that some spiders shed their legs when attacked, much like lizards do their tails, which can continue kicking for up to five minutes.

Darius and Mary-Anne Bartlett, Midleton, Co Cork

Our first daffodil fully opened on November 19th in an exposed site at our front gate. Before that the earliest was January 9th.

Seán Gallagher, Portadown, Co Antrim

We have had reports of apple trees and elder bushes flowering in September, and strawberry plants producing berries.

I came across a freshly dead woodcock near the Grand Canal Theatre recently.

Kevin Kenneally, Bishoptown, Cork

Most unusual, as woodcock are normally found in woodland and scrub. They can be found in south Dublin and in Wicklow in suitable habitats. It could have hit a building, dazzled by city lights.

There seems to be a noticeable reduction of brent geese visiting Irishtown Nature Park and Sandymount Strand compared with previous years.

Tom Curtis, Dublin 4

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address