Changing climate brings new garden visitors

There is a little bird that has been tweeting around my house for the past two months. He is at it early and late, never giving up and always repeating that same cheery tune. His song is a chatty affair, sounding like the happiest child in the class. Of late, I hear him on the golf course and in the hedges around my workplace. It’s a blackcap.

Now, the funny thing about the blackcap is that he is a new kid on the block; never in my Ox Mountain upbringing did I even hear of or see a Blackcap. His arrival among us and his back story is quite interesting.

Dramatic change 

Blackcaps are now one of our summer breeding visitors, but their status has changed dramatically in recent decades. While they used to depart for warmer climates in autumn, milder winters and garden bird feeders have recently encouraged these little birds to overwinter in Ireland. So, what has changed their habits, you might well ask. For one thing, it seems they have adapted their food tastes; from an insect-based diet to eating fruits, berries, and the contents of garden bird feeders, making it possible for them to survive an Irish winter.

So, what does a blackcap, now one of Ireland's top 20 most widespread garden birds, look like and how does he survive? Good old BirdWatch Ireland has the answer.

About the same size as a robin, adult male blackcaps have a distinct black cap, covering most of the head. The rest of the body is a rather grey-colour, while the vent is white. Adult female Blackcaps have pale brown cap, similar in extent to that of the male. The rest of the body is grey-brown, not as dark as the male.

Common summer visitor to woodlands and scrubby places and rural gardens from April to September. Also a common passage migrant in spring and autumn. Although Irish-breeding Blackcaps still migrate southwards in the autumn, some Blackcaps from the population that breeds in Central Europe migrate to Ireland to spend the winter here.

Adaptability 

Damien Enright, writing in the Irish Examiner in 2010, tells an interesting story about his interaction with a particular female blackcap.

A hen blackcap (which, actually, has a red cap) drives off all other birds and commandeers three peanut feeders and the bushes they hang on as her own. The only successful competitors are a troop of long-tailed tits. Not many blackcaps - greenish, robin-size warblers - are to be seen in Ireland in January and I am happy to help sustain her. Seeing her recalls the rich song of the black-capped male, with its fluted notes and melancholy endings, that I so often heard in the banana plantations in La Gomera in the Canary Islands. But she is a terrible bully. She can’t possibly consume 5% of the peanuts in the feeders, yet won’t let other birds get near them.

There is no doubt that global warming is also playing a role; enticing certain bird species to linger in Irish winters that are becoming increasingly milder. Enright goes on to explain about a time when the blackcap was not so plentiful here and how they have adapted their habits to enable them to spend more time with us.

In the winter of 1961, a blackcap caught by a cat in Britain was found to have been ringed in Austria during the breeding season there. Studies then revealed that part of the Austrian and east German blackcap nesters was migrating into the British and Irish Isles every winter and that the numbers had greatly increased in the postwar years as increasing numbers of householders put out scraps and hung peanut feeders in their gardens.

These European migrants were opportunistic birds; for them, a shorter journey, and easier pickings was a no-brainer! Also, their journey being shorter, they beat the African migrants each spring in the race for the best nest sites. The females arrive fatter and thus are capable of laying more and better-provisioned eggs. Enright continues:

So, in some 40 years, a race of short-hop migrants, programmed to fly west rather than south, appears to have evolved. Smaller and with shorter wings than their far-flying long-haul cousins, their beaks may even have grown longer, the better formed for pecking nuts from net-wire containers. Thus, we have a peanut-feeder evolution. Man’s humanitarian gesture has engendered a new, robust subspecies of bird.

Woodpeckers 

Back in 2010, bird expert, Niall Hatch, writing in Magill magazine, announced how the Great Spotted Woodpecker - known as 'Mórchnagaire breac' in Irish - had recently been sighted in counties Wicklow and Down, making it the first species of woodpecker ever to settle in Ireland.

Though the well-known Great Spotted Woodpecker is a common and widespread woodland and garden resident throughout our neighbouring island (and indeed from the Canary Islands right across to Japan), it was inexplicably absent from Ireland. It was as though St Patrick’s influence on our snake population had produced knock-on effects on woodpeckers, though a long period of glaciation may have been the real culprit in both cases.

Since 2010, the situation has changed with BirdWatch Ireland receiving an increasing number of phone calls and e-mails concerning strange black-and-white birds visiting back garden bird tables. Shortly afterwards, Great Spotted Woodpeckers were known to have bred in mature woodland in the two counties where they were first seen. Though still very rare and thinly distributed, it seems that they have gained a breeding foothold here at long last.

Woodpeckers have spread rapidly and now have established breeding populations in all counties. The Great Spotted Woodpecker has successfully expanded westward. Sightings have been confirmed in the Ox Mountains, as well as at the nearby Tubbercurry Oak Forest and in Cloonacool where local habitats, including mature broadleaf trees, have provided ideal nesting sites and foraging areas.

Louder Birdsong 

As I get older, I feel the dawn chorus is getting louder - maybe it’s just that I have more time to stop and listen. One way or another, the blackcap has definitely caught my attention in recent weeks and only the other evening, I heard the machinegun-like rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker in a nearby beech wood. I am less enamoured with the prospect of mosquitos coming our way - imagine that, mosquitos in the Ox Mountains - but in our changing world with its changing climates, where some of our bird species are on the endangered list, maybe we should be happy with small victories. Welcome the tweeting blackcap and all hail the headbanging woodpecker.