Ireland Through Birds. Conor W. O'Brien
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That same wind whips the river below them into a moiling swell. I can only imagine how cold it must be. At intervals, a cormorant surfaces, draped in beads dredged up from the depths, tiny pupils fixed in green eyes giving it a startled expression.
The path that traces the riverside overshadows a rocky shoreline, festooned with dank seaweed. Every few minutes, a redshank bursts from the shore with a panicked cry, only to be defeated by the wind and land just a few metres away. More at ease are the ruffs that also feed amongst the rocks. This can be a hard species to see in Ireland; Dundalk is one of the best spots for them. In summer, the males sport one of the most spectacular feathered appendages of any bird: the eponymous ruff, like a lion’s mane but more refined, forming a hat atop their head and curling around to complete a beard. This can vary from rufous to black or white, giving a selection of colours for the females to choose from at the communal leks where breeding males establish their credentials.
Sadly, wintering ruffs lose their fair-weather glad rags, attaining the more modest greys and browns typical of visiting waders, scalloped wings a souvenir of recent splendour. Robbed of their headgear, the males can look tragically plain, even potbellied, with their protruding midriff accentuated by the elongated neck and small head and bill. It’s as if they’ve purposefully flocked to a town once pregnant with Victorian vigour, in the hopes that some of this will rub off and restore the ruff that was the height of aristocratic fashion in days gone by. But even without their crowning glory, they can still strike a handsome figure in the morning light, periodically piercing through the clouds to lend them an ochre hue.
A few streets of terraced houses. A Gaelic football field sprinkled with oystercatchers, orange bills nestled beneath black wings. Rounding the bend, the mouth of the Castletown re-emerges before me. On the near side, the muddy bank rises steeply towards a wall. Across the river, skeletal vestiges of ruined wooden structures protrude at odd angles from the water. Each, to my eager mind, would make a perfect perch for a raptor, offering a commanding view of the wetland and the ducks and waders laid out in legions across its surface. But there’s no merlin in sight.
Not that Dundalk Bay is wanting for wildlife in their absence. The place is flowing with birds. Beyond the mudflats on the far bank, low reed beds, like a wheat field gone feral, stretch out into the distance. The Mourne Mountains are hazy on the horizon. Closer to, the café-au-lait brown of the mudflats is broken by a vast line of shimmering grey: knots, aligned in their thousands, every single one with their heads buried in their backs, as if in formation. Amidst their ranks one renegade stands out – bright red, a precocious romantic already in full breeding finery. A soldier of spring, surrounded by the grey phalanx of winter.
Fortunately, he’s not the only colour to be found on the riverside. Shelducks, with greens and oranges peeling into white, patrol the shoreline. More numerous are the teal, the males with their striking green-and-red helmets, filtering their way through the shallows. And at the heart of the river, a pair of red-breasted mergansers dive and surface in unison, like a submarine ballet. Lounging on the surface, pulsating with the waves, the male’s crest is battered around by the incessant wind.
I find so often with birdwatching it can be the stillness that stirs the life around you. It’s as if motion is one half of a totality, and your motionlessness forces the creatures in your shadow to move to restore the balance. If you stop to admire the glowing blooms of a gorse bush, the linnets within will erupt in a cacophony of chirps and white-bladed wings. Taking in the view from a seaside path, you’ll often send the curlews and godwits below scurrying for safety. If they’d just stood still you’d have been none the wiser to their presence.
It’s the same with birds of prey. When looking for raptors, unless they’re on territory, I often find your best hope is to let other birds do the hard work. These birds, with sharp eyes honed by instinct to react with revulsion to raptors, will usually be the first to spot the predator – and respond with venom. Buzzards, for instance, often have their presence betrayed by the cohort of irate corvids they draw into their orbit. Crows rarely shy away from challenging raptors – especially when they have numbers on their side.
Smaller passerines can’t do this. Usually they flock together, giving them the double advantage of more eyes to spot a predator, and more bodies to make it less likely you end up in the predator’s scope. When a raptor is spotted, instead of mounting an offensive, they take off in collective panic; a tornado of feathers intended to confuse their tormentor. This is usually the giveaway that a threat has been spotted. And it’s the smaller raptors, the falcons, the ones that take songbirds on the wing, which elicit the most potent response. Birds as big as a buzzard rarely bother with starlings or finches (and could almost never catch them even if they did). Instead, it’s the boomerang wings of the falcon, that consummate aerial killer, that strike them with the deepest fear. And so it is this response that I search for across the expanse of the mudflats.
Hope overtakes me whenever I see the redshanks, dunlins and shelducks on the opposite bank burst into flight. Periodically, amidst the probing and sifting of mud by bills long or flat, there’s an almighty commotion. Dunlins whirl with white bellies flashing. Shelducks lumber into the air in twos and threes. This is it, I keep thinking. The hunt is on.
But it’s a hollow hunt. There is no raptor to be seen as I scan the riverbank. Perhaps it’s a fox skulking amongst the reeds, a mink slithering out of the murk, or just a collective compulsion to seek a less-exposed section of mud on which to shelter from the breeze. Whatever’s disturbed the ducks and waders, it’s no raptor.
The long path tracing the river finally terminates at Soldier’s Point. It’s crowned with a haunting sculpture entwining a boat with a sepulchral human figure, as if in joint homage to Dundalk’s maritime tradition and also the past horrors visited on the people of this area. It recalls a time when not just airborne vagabonds made their way to Dundalk. Being a prominent port, during the Famine the town served as an exit point for thousands of desperate emigrants, searching for salvation overseas.
Below, the briars spread out past the last houses, a writhing mass of botanical carnage, crudely held back by slanting fences. I can make out no birds, much less raptors, amid the morass. The beating wind, with no features natural or man-made to impede it, makes it difficult for birds to make any headway. Most cling to the ground, hidden amongst the thorns. Beyond the briars, the mouth of the river is whipped into a swell. Winter still holds the bay in a merciless embrace, like talons, borne in of an eastern breeze, grasping at the exposed belly that is where Dundalk meets the sea.
But the battle of the seasons is a precarious one. By late morning, as I approach the spot where my sojourn began, the expanse of the Castletown River is bathed in sunlight. The breeze eases. If only for a moment, it feels like winter is in retreat, and has surrendered the town around me to the spring. In its wake, winter soldiers are left stranded on the muddy banks of the river: ruffs, in pairs, patrol the shallows, scalloped feathers unassuming, not yet succumbing to the aristocratic beauty they will soon assume. More stately are the godwits, long bills buried beneath the water’s surface, that sewing machine motion as they pry a steadfast worm from its burrow. And, among them, something special.
Amidst the redshanks dotted across the riverbank, I notice one, paler and thinner than the others, pirouetting in the water, like a dog chasing its tail. A darker stripe through the eye, and a bicoloured bill narrowing to a droop (think a drop of blood pooling at the end of a syringe) clinches the ID: a spotted redshank, a rare winter visitor, and another bird with a penchant for Dundalk and its surrounds. It’s a good find – some would say better than a merlin. Spinning about in the water on legs that seem almost too thin for its body, the bird pitches forwards mid-circuit, as if its head is suddenly too heavy to hold up. From the footpath I watch this ensemble of waders, the rare mingling with the common, none of them nervous about my presence. With birdwatching, you sometimes don’t always get what you want. But often, you get so much more.
My quarry has eluded me. But the search must go on. High-concept wildlife documentaries require months or years of toil, with untold near misses. Finding my merlin won’t be so arduous. On a wetland not so far flung, or a mountainside bog in spring, it’s waiting on its plucking post.
The sun creeping higher over Dundalk starts to warm my cheeks. Spring is on the march. Soon