Whatever you do, do nothing

ONCE moving into an old house late in winter, I mooched impatiently about the tangled and neglected garden. How, I asked a green fingered friend, should I go about getting to grips with it?

"You can strim the lawn," she said, "but do nothing else for a year. Just watch what grows." It took the whole 12 months for the garden to reveal itself "dead" shrubs suddenly smothered in flowers, bulbs springing up out of nowhere. The damage I'd have done with spade and loppers

A letter from Co Meath brings this to mind. "We have an old corn mill on our property," it says, "surrounded by old orchards and excellent hedgerows. There is quite a lot of wildlife about, which we endeavour to keep sparrow hawks, owls, badgers, foxes, etc. We leave the windows on the top floor of the mill open and this facilitates the owls. Is it possible to build suitable nest boxes for them, and where? Badgers what food should be left out for them? The hawks build at present in the old trees what about artificial nests?"

If's not at all the same situation, but still I want to shout "Don't touch a thing" Wild habitats, too, can be killed with kindness and over attention.

This one sounds like a ready made refuge for wildlife, an undisturbed corner of an old estate in a countryside progressively being tidied up, re landscaped, intensified. As an ecosystem, it already has its own mix of species, their lives all spaced out and balanced to match the food supply if it isn't broken, why fix it?

Badgers may need protection for their setts, but are best left to forage for themselves. Sparrow hawks know the branches they like to nest in and usually prefer to build a fresh one every year. Even if they could be tempted into a man made box, why do sob The number of hawks' depends on the supply of small birds as prey, not on the number of ready made nests to let.

The barn owls, too, sound well established and content the priority is not to disturb them and to keep their access open. But barn owls are a species under pressure in Ireland, and where a winter roost might be turned into a breeding site there is a good conservation case for making them at home with a wooden nest box. This has to be really big and heavy, with the right sized pop hold, and mounted deep in the darkness of a barn or high on the right sort of tree.

By chance, the same post brought a booklet called The Chesterfield Owls* written by a man who came to know a great deal about the barn owls living in old buildings in the Midlands.

Until his untimely death last year, Michael Feehan was a wildlife ranger based at Birr, Co Offaly. One spring day in the 1980s, walking in a wood outside the town, he flushed a barn Owl and stood amazed by its silent flight. It left a pellet below the tree the tight packed wad of bones, fur and feathers that owls disgorge to spare their digestion. Carefully picked apart, these pellets reveal what the owl has been eating.

In "a hobby that became a little more serious", Feehan went on to collect and analyse pellets systematically, month after month for three years, from owls nesting in ruined castles, an old corn mill and the Georgian ruin of Chesterfield House, near Birr.

Like other Irish studies, his work showed how restricted the owls' diet is in this island. Britain, with several species each of voles and shrews, has twice as many kinds of prey on the menu. The main mammals taken here are wood mice, rats and pigmy shrews, with birds and frogs way down the list. Michael Feehan also noted an apparent oddity that "the owl is not all that partial to rats but decapitates them and eats only the head most of the time".

Chesterfield House has now gone, and another six sites he names are under threat. With the loss of so many old trees, and the change to modern, more open barns, the ivied and brambled ruins of the countryside become all the more crucial to the owls survival. He believed that a lot of these could be maintained at little cost.

After decades of decline because of farming changes, barn owls in Britain and Ireland had seemed to be holding their own again. But they are at the northern edge of their global range (they do very well in the tropics), and a series of bitter, snowy winters could hit their numbers hard.

LONG spells of snow covered ground used not to after to them so much in the days of farm horses, when rickyards teemed with rodent's and flocks of little birds fed there on spilt grain. Today, in snowy weather, food can be harder to find.

The winter's impact on our birds in general will emerge only slowly, but the icy conditions are sure to have countered the extra breeding productivity of last year's long, hot summer. Frozen ground and streams have made feeding difficult for birds such as snipe and herons there have been great movements of waders to the milder margins of the west.

The most significant casualties are in the populations of tiny birds that have to eat all the time to keep warm. Hedgerow birds that went into the winter with territories will have done best (one reason why robins are such hardy survivors) but those left to wander in a strange country are more vulnerable.

Numbers of wrens, which chill so rapidly, seem to vary more from year to year than any other species gold crests and long tailed fits are among other species notoriously at risk from freezing weather. Whatever about nest boxes for barn owls, more conventional garden boxes for great and blue fits and other small hole nesting birds might help to compensate this spring for some of the losses of the winter.

Now is the time to fix them in place. For helpful information, try the Irish Wild bird Conservancy at 8 Longford Place, Monkstown, Co Dublin phone (01) 280 4322.