NATURE: Comings and goings of a Mayo winter

HOW we miss those heady days of early spring, when dawn is filled with eager birdsong and the sun filters through a canopy of new green to warm the ground.
Now, with that same sun fled far south, a dark and cold blanket of damp has been drawn over the land. A final few autumn flowers bow beneath the great beech: ox-eye daisy and devil’s bit stand brave before storm wind and gale, though with heads bowed and blackened leaves, their season all but over.
The fallen leaves of trees are swirled into quiet corners by a broom of wind. Crisp and dry they are burnished copper, yellow gold and more. When the rain lays them flat they soften and mould, providing a banquet for an unseen army of detritivores and decomposers. Turned by migrant thrushes, overthrown by fungal threads, dragged underground by earthworms, these are consumed by agents of the earth to replenish the soil that fed them while they grew.
This is season of decay. Yet it is more. It is also a time of rest and recuperation, and one of preparation for the great greening that lies just around the corner.
We looked more closely at newly bared stems of hazel, of guelder rose and whitebeam, and found truth in the old adage: ‘Every leaf has a bud beneath.’ We found there, amid the leaf-scars cleverly sealed by the trees, a metaphor for life itself. Those slumbering buds that formed at the foot of each now-fallen leaf will provide a new season of growth when the time is right. As one falls away the next is revealed.
At first unseen, our resident robin opened his throat to claim his corner. Although he is tolerant of other species of bird and minds not the finches, the thrushes and tits that share his world, woe betide any other robin that dares to stray into his territory!
They will come. I imagine them already on the wind, a tide of red-breasted migrants filling every vacant corner on their route and fighting for the right to remain.
Most female Irish robins have gone to find winter sunshine in parts of Europe, while the menfolk stay at home to defend their own piece of real estate. The only reason they hold territory is because they fought for it. Most remain at their peak for just a year or two and as soon as they begin to age they will be ousted.
As long as each one remains at the top of his game he will sing the winter through, not with the vibrant immediacy or rich, fluting enthusiasm of spring, but with a thin, slightly piercing tone. But sing he will, and his song will carry us through many dark winter evenings until all brighten as one with the return of the sun. While so many of our breeding birds head for warmer climes, other species make a welcome return. The most prominent among these are the swans and geese that decorate turloughs and other seasonal lakes.
The first whooper swans flew into Mayo nearly a month ago. I heard them long before they appeared overhead, a musical chorus of forty or more flying west, from where spilled light to colour the breast of each a pale, pink-tinted orange. Further west they became a silhouette, a long, wavering double V with one leg shorter than the rest.
These are Icelandic birds. If we think our own winter is bad, just try and imagine what it might be like over there! Although the whooper swan population has increased in recent years, it remains vulnerable. About 20,000 birds were recorded in 2021, when a determined effort was made to conduct a census of wintering swans across the country.
The whooper has a smaller cousin, the Bewick’s swan. That same census turned up a mere dozen of these, which are likely among the final few that will come this far west. Cold weather from the east pushes many birds further south and west. The response to a changing climate is for migrants to move less far.
The absence of some species does not mean these are disappearing altogether. Anyway, the niche they leave vacant will likely be filled by others that share a similar habitat. In only a few short weeks return flights will be underway. Our female robins will return from their winter homes and the males will be enthused, all the more so as foliage springs anew from those yet slumbering buds.