Another Life: The four Blackface rams down the boreen have a whole field to themselves, a benevolent quarantine before their November run among the ewes, writes Michael Viney.
"Tupping", a fitting word for such a perfunctory performance, is older than Shakespeare's Iago; "reithineacht", from our crumbling Dinneen, sounds even less fun.
While they wait for a modest orgy, the rams peer patiently across the ditch, one or two through remarkable spirals of horn - massive, gnarled bosses on the skull, tapering through a double twist to a smooth point that could take your eye out. But this very geometry, spectacular though it is, seems oddly devised to do any real harm: the same horn stretched out with its hook at the bottom might do real damage. The Greenland musk-ox, the sheep's great woolly Arctic cousin, has sweeping horns with which to scare off wolves.
So what are a ram's horns for? Fighting seems the obvious answer, since they do sometimes go in for it. Watching them the other morning, I saw a more familiar engagement. One ram approached another, pressed his horny brow to his neighbour's, and twined a foot between his legs like a footballer trying for a foul. They remained, heads together in a silent communing.
Once, however, hearing a sound like a fence-post being hammered in - thock! thock! - I found one ram with his horns tangled in a fence and a second backing off an extra foot or two before launching himself to collide with a massive precision, skull against skull. Between impacts, the animals nuzzled each other in what could have passed for affection, and drew dreamy lines on the turf with their delicate hoofs.
Male musk-oxen, too, for that matter, with their even more massively sculpted foreheads, take to battering each other on the tundra at mating-time. They charge from 20 metres or more and "the sound of their meeting", to quote Barry Lopez, "is like the fracturing of sea-ice". A good many of the Artiodactyla - the zoological order of even-toed ungulates - go in for head-bashing, but not necessarily for horns. Wart hogs don't have horns at all, and bison only tiny ones. Giraffes deal out severe blows with their heads but have only little cones of bone on their skulls.
What they all share, however, including sheep of both sexes, is a "pneumated" skull with a double roof of bone over their brains. So while horns can be useful for deflecting the blows of ritual and competitive aggression, and even for inflicting actual wounds, that may not have been their prime evolutionary advantage.
The extravagant horns of Ireland's extinct giant deer, (also Artiodactyla) curving out in great spiked shields to a span of almost four metres and weighing up to 40 kilos, have also been the focus of evolutionary debate. Were they actually for fighting, or mainly for showing off - part of the great peacockery with which the males of so many species seek to snare a willing female eye? Among the heated controversies that followed Darwin's Origin of Species, it was argued that such preposterous antlers can never have served an adaptive function. The great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, after measuring the deer antlers in Dublin's Natural History Museum and relating them to body size, suggested that, rather than being used in combat, they were, indeed, status symbols in the ritual mating confrontations between males.
Later, he changed his mind. He was impressed by some practical experiments carried out on the flat roof of the museum in 1985 by a Scottish zoologist, Andrew Kitchener, and Nigel Monaghan, now keeper of the museum.
Each equipped with a set of deer antlers, they did battle, pushing and struggling until they found the lowered angle at which the horns locked together and the real force of battle was absorbed by the neck muscles and a thickened skull. As mere implements for display, concluded Kitchener, the antlers were "massively overdesigned." The same could be said, perhaps, of the rams' spiralling horns (or, for that matter, of the peacock's elaborate tail). But an American researcher, Valerius Geist, spent time testing the idea that the horns of mountain sheep - in his case, those of the wild bighorn sheep of western North America - evolved as display organs.
Having shown to his satisfaction that rams do notice the relative scale of their cranial equipment, he concluded that "the horns of rams are not only important as weapons and shields in combat but also as the major dominance-rank determinance and as visual dominance-rank symbols". Large-horned rams, he added, get more than their fair share of tupping - and die younger.
The great antlers of the giant Irish deer can be inspected on the new - and suitably wide - 55c postage stamp. It marks the 150th anniversary of the Natural History Museum
Eye on Nature
In the woods in Abbeyleix I saw saw two male deer fighting. They
had flat bladed antlers, were dark brown and smaller than red deer
but had no white spots. Would red deer and fallow deer or fallow
and sika deer crossbreed?
Isabel Harvey (age 11), Abbeyleix, Co Laois
They were fallow deer. Red deer and sika deer crossbreed, but
not fallow deer.
I grow a row of alpine strawberries in a greenhouse border and
when I returned from holidays in early September there was a neat
pile of them by a flowerpot. Was it a mouse, squirrel or bird?
M Jordan, Portadown, Co Armagh
It was the wood (field) mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, which
collects fruit and carries them away to eat in a secluded
place.
Walking by the Grand Canal, I saw a creature swimming. Far too
large for a rat, with a small dog-like head and about three feet
long, was it an otter or could it have been a mink?
Dick Tulloch, Mountpleasant, Dublin 6
It was an otter.