My family was on track to kiss the legendary Blarney Stone during a recent holiday in Ireland. I had a different agenda – tracking down some equally legendary Irish sparrows.
Our holidays tend to go that way, whether to view tourist attractions like the ancient and symbolic Blarney Stone or the sublime beauty of birds.
There was no conflict however when it came to Blarney Castle – the home of the stone – just outside the historic city of Cork.
My son’s girlfriend was tracing her Irish ancestry and as everyone with Irish roots will attest an encounter with the Blarney Stone on an Irish expedition is as exciting as a pint of Guinness downed in an Irish pub.
Although I do not have Irish ancestry, I did my best to keep up with the Irish theme of it all beyond birds, and was rewarded eventually with a trip to the Guinness Brewery when we reached Dublin.
All the way around Ireland, though, my thoughts and eyes strayed towards the birds, especially some particularly unusual Irish house sparrows I had read about before leaving for the land of the Shamrock.
The sparrows are the subject of ground-breaking research by an Irish bird expert Sean Ronayne to prove his theory that sparrows have different song patterns – or accents – in difference parts of the country. Specifically, Ronayne has been comparing the songs of sparrows in his home town of Cork to those in Dublin. 261 kilometres to the north
Coincidentally, both cities were on our tourist route so I could do a little research of my own.
I’m familiar with the chirp and tweet of European house sparrows on my home turf of Hobart. And I have long suspected that they sound slightly different to those in London where I spent my childhood. The same applies to blackbirds – like sparrows, introduced from Britain in Victorian times – so I was up for the challenge of defining different accents.
At Blarney Castle, after viewing he stone, I went in search of the sparrows.
Sean Ronayne is on a mission to record the songs and calls of every Irish species along with identifying different dialects and variations. So far he has about 160 recordings and hopes to reach 200 so he can produce an audio guide.
Dialects and accents emerge in bird music because songs have to be learned in part from parents, even if the ability to sing is inherited. Crows may “caw” and warblers warble but the song is an individual thing within clans in the broader bird family. So the song of a sparrow in Cork would be unrecognisable to a sparrow in Dublin.
Between Cork and Dublin I listened hard for the difference, but I must admit at the end of the day it was a sparrow dialect that fell on deaf ears.