North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Nine lives are not enough

My parents put up both a bird feeder and a nesting box this year. A pair of blue tits ignored the box, but built a nest directly above it in a crack in the wall. As for the bird feeder, it also doubled as a cat feeder.

The first cat next door was a playful little character, but maybe just a little too adventurous. On one trip to the local lake, he hopped out from under the bonnet - he had hitched a ride in the engine compartment. He strolled out of the yard one night to meet his destiny as road kill, never to return. I doubt if the flock of sparrows that braved his attention to eat at the bird feeder shed too many tears - one less murderous furball to worry about.

His replacement and doppelganger shared his taste in small birds and jaywalking. He too met his destiny with a car tyre. But this guys was a little tougher. After three days, he dragged himself back home on three paws - one of his hind legs shattered. The vet put him back together, and now his brush with death seems to have increased his appetite for sparrows.

On a wet Sunday, on the last day of this July, he dumped a small bunch of brown feathers onto the lawn. He played around with it for a while, and then left it, bored. I was about to go out to dump it when I saw it move. And again, one of the wings flickered. Luckily for the sparrow, the moggy was too busy preening to realize that he hadn't finished the job. The first task was to get rid of the cat - it literally spent the rest of the day in the doghouse, since the kennel was the only place it couldn't escape from.

Almost as soon as I picked up the sparrow, it began to recover. It was still stunned, but it didn't seem to have any wounds. Soon, it began to struggle, so I left it under a hazel tree in the hedge where the rest of the flock congregated in the hope that it might regain the strength to fly again, before the cat came snooping around again (I wore gloves to minimize the scent - probably in vain).

On the face of it, there seems to be no shortage of sparrows. But their numbers have dropped dramatically since the Seventies, following on from a more gradual decline in the last fifty years.. (You can read a full report here from the BTO or read a summary from the BBC here. The BTO (British trust for Ornithology) report doesn't point to any one particular reason for the decline (cats don't figure prominently as a potential cause) - possible causes range from the fact that streets are cleaner (no horse poo - I wonder if Killarney has an abundance of sparrows) to the use of unleaded petrol (there's speculation that the chemicals used to replace lead have affected the insects on which the sparrows feed (so much for eco-friendly,eh?). The BBC link gives a number of steps that people can take to help boost the sparrow population, such as building a next box, and leaving out food in winter. It doesn't mention anything about driving over the cat.

ireland, irishblogs,monasette

Posted by Monasette at October 11, 2005 10:36 PM