The hooded crow is one of the most recognisable common birds in Lucan. At first glance, it looks like a large common crow. Look closer, however, and you might see that the body feathers are not black, but are, in fact, a dark gray, the key marker of the hooded crow. The hooded crow has nested itself well into Irish mythology. In some legends, it is the Badb, a war goddess who strikes fear into the enemy. In other legends, she is a disguised version of the Bean-sídhe (or ‘Banshee’), a legend that has particular local significance given the repeated references to sightings on the Lock Road over the centuries.
I’ve always been taken with the idea of the hooded crow as a watcher. There is said to be two realities in Ireland. There is the ceantar, our physical world, and the alltar, the otherworld. We cannot see the otherworld. The puca cast a skim over it so that we can only see the ceantar. And they place hooded crows in strategic lookout points to keep us in watch.
Earlier this week, walking through the Hillcrest estate in Lucan, I had noticed great battles between hooded crows and gulls as each vied for the best rooftop lookout posts. I had first noticed two hooded crows swooping low together over a rooftop on Hillcrest Lawns, sending a clear signal to a lone sentry gull. He took the hint and flew south. They escorted him for a distance to make sure that he didn’t return before one of them landed and claimed the roof as their own. On Hillcrest Drive, I watched the reverse as two gulls landed and hopped menacingly towards a hooded crow who quickly ceded the higher ground. On Hillcrest Way, I watched a single cheeky chappie of a hooded crow land on a roof that was already festooned with five gulls. He hopped at them, one by one, and made them move. He momentarily occupied the roof’s apex before flying away, satisfied with the success of his brief raid. In Irish myth, the hooded crow marks the boundary of this world and the nether. The common gull, on the other hand, is much more functional and exists only to eat garbage and to bring sorrow to newly-washed cars.
I had thought about perhaps doing a ramble to explore the bird life around Lucan. I had thought that the peak springtime of late March could be a good opportunity to watch the building of nests and the return of winter migrants. Since beginning these rambles in 2021, I have noticed many different types of bird, ranging from the common gull to the crow, the dunnock and the robin. I have also seen less common sightings, such as the heron, the cormorant and the falcon. There is even a bird that I have seen a number of times in a tree that stands in the demesne over the wall from where Tandy’s Lane meets the Leixlip Road; the bird is either a magnificent barn owl or a particularly obese and gormless woodpidgeon. Birds. That was the plan for this weekend’s ramble. But it was not to be.
I started these rambles last year, when we were all confined to a radial limit of 5km from our houses. These limits were imposed as one of many measures to try to halt the spread of the Covid 19 virus. But two days ago, it became my turn, and I finally tested positive. Unhelpfully, I tested positive just hours after playing a St. Patrick’s Day gig in Carrick On Shannon. By Friday, I was feeling the full effects of the virus and had developed just about every symptom known to science.
And so, my original 5km boundary recedes to the mere few feet of the attic bedroom in which I shall isolate for at least the next week. How, then, to explore Lucan without leaving the house?
I wake this morning to day three of this illness. Sunday. The vernal equinox – the day to the Loughcrew neolithic cairns and the Adamstown Obelisk are celestially aligned … albeit the Adamstown one being something that was accidental and discovered by me a few weeks ago. The house is silent. There is nobody watching television, nobody listening to a podcast, nobody playing music. It is a rare silence. The windows in my room have remained open all night to improve ventilation. Through them, the sounds of Lucan enter. The distant purr of the N4 traffic. A couple of words exchanged between neighbours. The harsh subsong of the crows.
I do not know much about bird watching. Learning how to spot the local birds has always been on my ‘to do’ list, something I’ve been saving for a day where I have nothing else to learn. A day like today. I download an app that purports to be able to listen to your surroundings and identify the birds in your area – something that I’m sure has ornithologists squawking their disgust.
The app instantly returns results. I get a plethora of ‘hits’ for the Sedge Warbler. This is unexpected as these birds are usually only found in wetlands and, while there are wetlands in Lucan, there are none in the immediate vicinity of my house. The app now gets a hit on the Eurasian Nuthatch. And another. And another. Soon, there are seventeen hits for this bird. This is particularly remarkable given that the Nuthatch has long been absent from Irish skies, meaning that either the app is flawed or I’ve just entered Irish ornithological history on my first day as a birdwatcher. I’m guessing it’s the latter. I then get a hit on a Hoopoe, which is quite a feat given that less than ten are seen in Ireland on average each year.
I decide that the app has done just about all it can do and I decide to do a little research online myself to see if I can learn how to recognise and pick out the sounds of birds myself. I hear a tutti of musical notes followed by a descending whistle. This is a chaffinch. I hear the low, chuffed coo-cooing of a species of pigeon. I hear the gentle whistle and chirp of a blackbird. I hear the movement of the songthrush trills from the geometric and angular to the sporadic and freeform. And, finally, I hear the hooded crow – not from his caw, but from his footsteps as his feet walk over the tile slates on the roof above my head (Insert covid/corvid pun here).
This week, I have allowed the sounds of Lucan to ramble to me. However, a final word about the Covid 19 virus; I’m a lot sicker than I would have imagined. While I know that the worst variants have passed, this is still something to contend with. Let’s not let our guard fully down just yet.