Ireland Through Birds. Conor W. O'Brien
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wet earth. They only concede to herbivorous temptation when it’s sweet-wrapped in the form of fruit.
On and on the path meanders through the fields, past a barn bursting with cattle and dung heaps sprinkled with ice. Sheep graze, docile, on one side. On the other, a limousin bull, horns blackened at the tips, glares at me as I walk past. He marches forth with purpose, placing himself between me and the cows and calves feeding behind him. For a moment, I wish there were more than a few flimsy strands of barbed wire separating us.
As the sun rises higher, the frost goes into full retreat. The barbed wire is hung with golden droplets, like bunting festooned about the farmland in celebration of spring. In its wake, the melting frost leaves its residue across the grassy fields, and they start to sparkle. They make a perfect course for hares, bounding across the fields in twos and threes every time I draw near. At times, they rock back on their hind legs to scan the surroundings. This is when their size impresses; they’re close to twice the size of the rabbits I’d mistaken them to be at a distance.
As it is for the partridges, Lough Boora and its surrounding parkland is a sanctuary for the Irish hare – the only member of its clan native to Ireland. This is one of the few places where they seem to outnumber rabbits, their invasive cousins from the continent. Rabbits are a relic from the days of the Norman adventurers, following them on their conquests across this island. But the hare has been here since at least the end of the last Ice Age, long before the first people.
Unlike rabbits, hares have a penchant for bog land, but can also thrive on farms when there are plentiful hedgerows for them to escape to. And in the now carefully managed environment at Lough Boora, conditions for them (as for the partridge) are perfect. The sheer mass of the hare doesn’t lend itself to a subterranean retreat, and so they are forced to shelter out in the open. That leaves them exposed to hunters, human or other. But at Lough Boora, the presence of predators is strictly curbed to allow the partridge to flourish undisturbed. It is this benign human interference that helps other herbivores thrive here too, an Eden where prey sneer at predators from behind the shield of man.
As I venture farther and farther along the trail, the trees vanish, and with them the long-gone caws of the rookery. Instead, the bird calls here are a blend of farm and wetland. The croak of a pheasant mingles with the pews of lapwings, and the honking of distant geese. It feels like Lough Boora cannot decide what kind of aviary it most desires to assemble, and so keeps a wide menagerie in an attempt to please all comers.
Buried within the mosaic of fields is a designated space solely for nourishing the partridge. Knowing how they thrived in pre-modern farmland, it’s not hard to see why. Crossing the threshold, you feel like you’ve set foot on a Midlands farm as it might have been long ago. The grass is long and golden brown, unchecked by ruminant or machine. The fields here are loosely demarcated, their foliage patchier; meadows, caught somewhere between the wild and tame. Blotchy legumes lend green to the scene. In spots, vestiges of the bog still manage to creep through, the sun-cooked peat crumbling like chocolate cake. Its virility pours into the spring shoots that crest across its surface, in between the patchwork of crops. Combined, they make plentiful cover for the partridge to hide in.
No surprise, then, that they’re not the first birds that catch my eyes. Lapwings, another species that thrive in the no-man’s land set aside for the partridge, fill the air with synthesised bleeps. On thick, clubbed wings that flick from dark to white, they wheel high and low over the fields, chasing others into the air, enticing them to join in the fun of it all. On the ground they strut about with rear ends held high, a stance more moth than bird. Sometimes, as I follow the trail that encloses the fields, I mistake the tapering tail of a lapwing for the extended neck of a partridge, craning to keep me in view. Overhead, skylarks make a constant murmur, wings beating ceaselessly to hold them aloft. Every now and then, amidst the gargle of notes, they happen upon a phrase they like and repeat it two or three times; an improvising musician hoping to spin a hit song from hours of fruitless exertion.
If the lapwing and skylark are aerial masters, yielding their finest performances on the wing, then the partridge is the terrestrial specialist, preferring to crawl amongst the fields than cast shadows on them from above. Flightless birds are a rarity in the northern hemisphere. In Ireland, we lost our last in 1844, the year when the world’s last great auk (a flightless cousin of the razorbill and puffin) succumbed to the rapacious hunting of scientific collectors.
The great auk was the northern hemisphere’s answer to the penguins. Most terrestrial flightless birds (of which the dodo is the most famous) evolve on remote islands, un-ravaged by mammalian predators. In such isolated Edens, it’s surprising the predictability with which so many birds surrender the hard-won inheritance that is powered flight, in favour of a more leisurely life confined to the ground. The far-flung isles of the Pacific and Indian Oceans were once well stocked with flightless feathered denizens, which included among their number some of the largest birds that ever lived.
Ireland has never quite had the dearth of scurrying, egg-thieving menaces to make true flightlessness feasible, though the closest we’ve come in living memory to a flightless land bird would almost certainly be the grey partridge. While their close cousins, the grouse, are typically birds of desolate mountain slopes, partridges are most at home in open fields. They are birds of grassland, of prairies, the rabbits of the bird world. Hunched over, they scuttle about the grass in family groups (coveys) preferring to scurry to safety in denser undergrowth whenever danger arises. Flight, that ancestral safety mechanism, is retained only as a final contingency, when the threat is too sudden or too fast to run away from. Then, the partridge take off on whirring wings over the fields. The partridge is sedentary. It has no need to cross oceans for the winter, so the only time it needs to divorce itself from the ground at all is when a predator cannot be hidden from or outrun.
The covey is at the centre of partridge life. Taking to open spaces leaves you more exposed to attack from the air or ground. So, the rules that obligate herding in deer and sheep dictate the same behaviour for the partridge. Plenty of eyes make short work of spotting incoming predators. But this strategy far from guarantees survival for the chicks, many of whom succumb to the usual malaises such as hunger and cold.
To help compensate for this, the mother partridge produces the largest clutch of any Irish bird: twenty-nine eggs is the record, a truly astounding reproductive feat. In a typical covey, the female will be joined by her mate, hatchlings and any of last year’s brood that have outlived their first winter. They may also generously open up their group to unrelated adults that have failed to breed, offering them the faint comfort of (greater) safety in numbers. Or perhaps there is just some peace to be had in silent company, foraging in the fields together. Now, in spring, the coveys start to fragment. Maturing partridges begin to coalesce into pairs; the males fan their tales, spread their wings and flash the dark horseshoe across their bellies in a bid to woo a mate. Now they are ready to form their own covey and splinter off from their natal flock.
The partridge chicks, like their counterparts among the mammals that graze the open planes, are precocial. They can walk and follow their mother around within an hour of hatching – and they need to. Not for them is the snug nest of a songbird, tucked away in a thicket, a schiltron of thorns to thwart the efforts of predators. Nesting on the ground, partridge chicks are exposed to all the threats that terrestrial living brings. They have to be mobile at once, or will surely get picked off.
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