A View North A bird’s-eye view of a Belfast nest

By Jack Holland

I suppose you could say that growing up in Belfast we were ornithologically challenged. None of us ever saw anything more exotic than a pigeon or a sparrow. I assumed that this was typical of life in all big cities. Clearly, I was wrong, as my experience in New York has shown. Early one morning a week ago, I saw a beautiful cardinal on a street in Brooklyn. Two years before that, I saw a peregrine falcon kill a pigeon on a rooftop above the same street. There was a falcon that nested for a time on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The bird life of Belfast never was so various, which in one way is strange since it was much closer to the countryside than is New York. I mean, all we had to do was walk to the top of the street and turn west to see the forms of sheep and cows like faint specks on the green sward of the Black Mountain.

The first ornithological activity that I ever witnessed was thanks to my granny, which was odd because as a country woman raised on a farm I would have thought she had little time for our feathered riffraff. But every morning she would fill her apron with crumbs and sprinkle them in the street outside our front door for the pigeons to peck. A few sparrows would always muscle their way into the flock, sparrows being among the most pugnacious of birds.

We had two bird lovers in the street, both of them Protestants (I’m not suggesting, by the way, that there is any relationship between these facts.) Mr. Vincent, who lived at the bottom of the street, kept pigeons in his back yard. Mr. Robinson, who lived next door to us, kept budgies, also in a shed in the backyard, right next to where the coal was kept. He bred them, and sold them. We even bought one for ourselves. I spent many fruitless hours trying to teach ours to talk. Perhaps I had confused it with a parrot — a difficult feat, it might be supposed, but one that indicates how limited my acquaintance was with bird life.

Pigeon fanciers were once very common in Belfast. But it was a distinctly class-based hobby. Only working-class people kept pigeons. There were no pigeon fanciers up the Malone Road or around Balmoral, but there was at least one in every street around the Shankill and the Falls.

In some ways it is easy to see why the Belfast working man "fancied" pigeons. Pigeons are the most urban (as distinct from urbane) of birds. There is nothing fancy, or showy, or bright, or pretty, or beautiful about them. They are just dull, gray, unpretentious, kind of creatures, blending in very well with the city environment. They don’t even need trees or bushes to thrive. Give them a wall or a window ledge or a lamppost or a chimney stack and they are happy. The average Belfast man would never be seen dead with anything too colorful, especially a bird. Budgies were probably on the outer limits of colorfulness. Can you imagine what your workmates at the shipyard or at the docks would say if they found out you were keeping, say, pink flamingoes? (Let us ignore for a moment the obvious climatic problems that keeping flamingoes in Belfast would raise.) They would question your manhood — at the very least. They would be afraid of being left alone with you. But a pigeon fancier was OK. There is nothing morally suspicious about that — no hint of any ‘sthetic notion there at all. Did not Bob McCandless, the Shankill man who owned a prize-winning racing pigeon, call it (somewhat confusingly) Ugly Duckling? That reminds us that the other — and perhaps main — reason why pigeon fancying was morally impeccable was that pigeons actually did something: they raced.

The other thing about pigeon fancying was that, using today’s sociological jargon, it was a gender-specific activity, as well as being class bound. That is, it was something only men did. One possible reason is that working-class women had little time for fancying anything, other than a good night’s sleep.

It was during my first trips into the countryside in the summer, when we went down to Rostrevor in the Mourne Mountains or to Omeath under the slopes of the Cooley Mountains, that I broadened my ornithological outlook by becoming acquainted with crows. It was not a pleasant experience. While walking in those bleak mountains, I frequently came across the remains of dead sheep often found lying at the foot of gullies or rocks. I was told by my uncle that crows pecked their eyes out, so they became blind and fell to their doom. I don’t know if this is true, but anyone who has seen a crow could well believe it. It is a malicious-looking bird. The anti-crow feeling goes back a long way. A Celtic warrior if he met a solitary crow on his way to battle would turn around and go home, because it represented bad luck. It is easy to see why. Crows are carrion birds. In ancient times they hung around battlefields waiting for the action to finish, just as today, as you drive along the motorways in Ireland you see them on patrol, hoping for something to get squished. And that includes you. In the Celtic mind they are birds that will be forever associated with death.

Back in Belfast, we were safe from crows. But not from starlings — which represented a different kind of menace, especially if you were a statue. Ask Queen Victoria, whose statue used to stand outside the Royal Victoria Hospital, a few yards from where I lived on the Grosvenor Road. The drapery she wore was not entirely regal, thanks to the thick coating of droppings covering her august head and shoulders. As wee Fenians, we found this amusing, if not downright delightful, such were our political sentiments at the time.

While starlings cannot be said to have a political outlook, they did seem to have a thing about marble, bombarding the City Hall so much that finally the burghers of Belfast had to hire people to set off loud booms to scare them away. Perhaps if they return it will be ornithological confirmation that the Troubles are well and truly over.