What has happened to the goldfinch population? Where has it gone? asks Kevin Myers
This time last year, the hedgerows of Kildare were alive with them, and they queued in a glorious but orderly manner to gorge at our window-feeders. Aside from the kingfisher, the goldfinch is our only truly brilliantly plumaged perching bird, with its red face, black and white head, cream and tawny front, and black and gold wings. Moreover, it is truly native. The kingfisher's greater family, Alcenididae, is mostly tropical, and the original kingfisher probably arrived on these shores in a bunch of Fyffes' bananas.
Not so the goldfinch. Ancient Irish tales abound with goldfinches. St Patrick used to attract them by standing with his hands outstretched: a single flick of his thumb, and he would crack its neck, and he'd pop the still warm corpse into his mouth.
Brian Boru was tucking into a celebratory dish of deep-fried goldfinches when a militant vegetarian Dane slunk up behind him. His dying gasps were in fact the familiar goldfinch call of switt-witt-witt-witt followed by a soft ahi - i.
For the goldfinch is not just our most beautiful-looking bird. Its song is delightful, and few things are as delightful as a charm of goldfinches in a hedgerow chanting to one another, and then leaping in gold-meshed swirls to another vantage point.
Indeed, it was their extraordinarily winning ways which nearly did for them in the 19th century, for they were captured for caging almost everywhere. At one site in Britain, 132,000 were caught annually.
The goldfinch is not just a beautiful bird, but a highly useful one too. It eats some insects, certainly, but its primary diet in the summer and the autumn is thistle seeds. This explains its elegantly non-finchly beak, which has been refined down the years for probing inside the thistle heads and removing those scrumptious thistle seeds.
Goldfinches are therefore nature's thistle-contraception: without them, the thistle population would take over the planet. Thistle jungles would sprout in Laois: thistle rain-forests would take over Offaly. Thistle-down would gather in great clouds, blotting out the sun, and causing massive climate change. Population pressure would cause thistles to become diverse, as did the goldfinch's cousins on the Galapagos. There would be new forms of thistle, as thick as oak trees, and other thistles, as slender as grass.
Of course, this was all hypothesis - up until the apparent disappearance of the goldfinch in the course of the past year. It could well be merely a localised problem, and goldfinches are prospering everywhere else in Ireland. So perhaps the Kildare goldfinches have gone on a FÁS course on the Galapagos, where they are learning to extract boy-scouts from horses' hooves or catch and kill black-back gulls.
On the other hand, maybe there has been a nationwide extinction of goldfinches, either through disease, or because of the Khmer Rouge of the avian world, the magpie. No one has been able to explain how the latter has become so successful in recent decades. It is said to have arrived in Ireland the same year as Oliver Cromwell, and for centuries afterwards, it remained an aloof, reticent creature. Indeed, it was such a rare bird that children used to recite a nursery rhyme every time they came across it - one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy.
Then something changed, particularly in Ireland, which for some strange reason is a country where the crow-tribe prospers especially.
Magpies began to gather in large flocks - moreover, they became extraordinarily aggressive and predatory, and whatever population controls had once exerted themselves on the species vanished. Each spring has now became a time of murder, as magpies forage through the hedgerows, massacring fledglings.
This year, it seems, they won't be massacring any goldfinches, because there aren't any to massacre. They're gone - either wiped out last year by the magpie, or wiped out by disease. But what disease? And why is it particular to the goldfinch, without - apparently - harming the chaffinch, the greenfinch or the bullfinch? But equally, if the cause of the goldfinch's decline is Pol Pot and his merry band of Pied Assassins, why did the populations of other finches not fall also? Is it perhaps a question of aesthetics, that the magpie couldn't bear the brilliant colours of the goldfinch? It seems unlikely that climate is to blame for the disappearance of the goldfinch, because the bird is found right across Europe, from southern Scandinavia to Sicily and even into North Africa. The goldfinch prospers everywhere. So why have its numbers fallen to the point of invisibility in South Kildare? Perhaps the answer lies in its diet. Maybe one of the plants which the goldfinch feeds off has learned how to get its own back. The goldfinch - the male in particular, with its slightly longer beak - is the only bird which is able to reach into the heart of the teasel flower to extract the seeds.
However, some teasels have such strong hooks on their seed-heads that they're able to entrap the bird and it dies. Possibly, super-teasels have arrived from America to even the odds. The revenge of the teasels might provide an explanation for the fate of the goldfinch - except, as I said, it is primarily the cock-bird which feeds off the teasel, like lads in the pub, while the hen-bird remains at home doing the ironing, glancing at the clock and scowling.
So, the teasel theory alone couldn't explain the apparent extermination of the entire goldfinch population.
Where have our goldfinches gone? And are they gone for good?