Life

Take on nature: Chaffinches are not quite bachelor birds

The blue-grey head, brownish back and pinkish belly of the male chaffinch contrasts greatly with the uniform brown of the female
The blue-grey head, brownish back and pinkish belly of the male chaffinch contrasts greatly with the uniform brown of the female The blue-grey head, brownish back and pinkish belly of the male chaffinch contrasts greatly with the uniform brown of the female

‘FROM your lofty perch atop the leafy tree… You pipe your tunes… The tunes your father piped in days gone by'.

The words of Irish-born poet Francis Duggan, now living in Australia, on our much-admired, handsome chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), a common and widespread breeding bird of Irish gardens and woodlands.

The bird has a special significance for me as it was the first garden bird I was able to positively identify as a boy with a budding interest in birds. It has the characteristic forked tail of a finch and a typical seed-eater’s bill to deal with beech mast, grain and small seeds.

The blue-grey head, brownish back and pinkish belly of the male contrasts greatly with the uniform brown of the female, though both have the striking white wing-bars. Their ‘chink chink’ call is a familiar sound in the garden and in full song it gives us a vigorous cascade of notes, ending with a final rattle.

Known in Irish as ‘an rí rua’ the red King, as well as ‘coinleog’, the stubble bird, part of the chaffinch’s scientific name is also most revealing. Fringilla coelebs was assigned to the chaffinch in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist and explorer whose lasting achievement was the creation of a system for formally classifying and naming organisms according to their genus and species, a system which became universally adopted.

‘Coelebs’, from Latin, means ‘unmarried’ and Linnaeus gave the chaffinch this name after observing that individual birds wintering around his home in Sweden were all male birds. The females wintered further south, a pattern of behaviour known as differential migration.

The generic ‘fringilla', also from Latin means ‘small bird’. Consequently male chaffinches are often referred to as ‘bachelor birds’.

Most breeding pairs do, however, usually return to the same nest site year after year. Their nest, a beautifully constructed deep cup of moss mixed with lichen, grasses and roots, bound together with spiders’ webs and lined with wool and feathers, is usually built tightly into a fork of a tallish shrub or within a hedgerow.

Chaffinch eggs are a light blue colour sometimes variably tinged with pink and dark chestnut-red spots.

The bird is highly valued in Germany for its musical powers and extravagant prices are paid for especially good performers. A workman from the town of Ruhla in the forest region of Thuringia, central Germany, was so taken by one bird that he gave a cow in exchange for it, resulting in the local proverb, ‘this chaffinch is worth a cow.’ Other stories closer to home warn of treachery if the bird lands on a windowsill and that rain will follow its song.

Also noteworthy this weekend is the chaffinch’s cousin the Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) a red-faced finch with vivid yellow wing bars. The bird features in the lore of St Valentine’s day, a date which English poet Geoffrey Chaucer helped transform from being simply a religious feast day in honour of St Valentine’s martyrdom (February 14) to a day when love might flourish.

He wrote in Parlement of Foules (1382), ‘this was the day when every bird cometh there to choose his mate'.

Apparently on this day, the first bird a girl sees could give a clue as to the man she would marry. If it was a woodpecker, she would not marry at all; a robin, he would be a sailor; a sparrow, he would be a poor man; a crossbill, an argumentative man; if a goldfinch however, she would be promised a wealthy marriage.