None flies straighter or with more urgency than the wren

• Date: 19 December 2020
• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Michael Viney
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

Here, on St Stephen's Day, a pint in my hand, I faced four young entrants in cardboard masks, bearing a live wren on a holly twig in a 2lb jam jar. Their recitation of "the wran, the wran, the king of all birds" was stumbled through apologetically and secured the 50p I had left on the counter. It did not, I regret, secure the freedom of the wren.

Such local, small-scale customs have generally disappeared from Ireland, leaving YouTube videos to celebrate surviving, if wrenless, community festivals, notably in Dingle and Dublin's Sandymount. As I write, their nature this Christmas seems uncertain.

Of all the myths, pagan or Christian, attaching to Troglodytes troglodytes (so named as the original "cave dweller" of Greek description), the one that appeals to me goes back to Aesop and explains the wren's kingship as winning an avian competition in high flying. The wren hitched a lift under the wing of an eagle and took off even higher at the peak of the raptor's flight, to win the contest. But there was punishment for such aeronautical mischief.

"When they were going down," relates a tale recorded in Irish, "the eagle hit him on the back with his beak. He hurt him in the back and ever since he cannot fly but from hedge to hedge and from bush to bush." Or, to quote a Ted Hughes poem: "The wren is a nervous wreck/ Since he saw the sun from the back of an eagle./ He prefers to creep . . ."

Breeding

Stripped of such fancies, the wren attends our western winter in a loyal whirr of wings. In December dusks of dove-grey clouds adrift on flame, small birds dash about between the hedges and dry stone walls, as if remembering last-minute errands.

None flies straighter or with more urgency than the wren, which, as it sometimes seems to me, has the power of passing through the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Or, as Michael Longley sees it, "two wings criss-crossing/ through gaps and loop-holes,/ a mote melting towards/ the corner of the eye."

In the wren boys' refrain, "Although he is little, his family's great" and that's certainly true. Considered in sheer numbers alone, the mid-winter of a good breeding year may find up to 20 million wrens in these islands, some six million of them in Ireland.

I include all islands, large and small, for the wren hunts insects and spiders among the...