Monday, November 12, 2007
HUGE excitement among the birding community and more ominous signs of climate change.
Birdwatchers at Crookhaven Bird Observatory — a rented house where a group of friends annually flock to observe the incoming autumn migrants — listed an all-time record of rare species. Normally, our rarities come from the Americas, carried on the prevailing westerly winds; this time, they come from the East, like the Magi, and are just as magical.
A high-pressure belt normally stable over Central Asia moved west.
Birds migrating from summer breeding grounds in Siberia, Mongolia and China and heading south east for a balmy winter in Indonesia found themselves caught up in a jetstream above the area of high and moved north-west instead.
Birders call this phenomenon eastern drift or reverse migration. It brought extraordinary birds to Ireland, birds never seen here before.
And it was not only the rarities of the species but the numbers of individuals of those species that arrived. There may well be one in your garden. A few days ago, I saw a yellow browed warbler from Siberia myself. It foraged in a bush only four feet away from me.
Like a little green chiffchaff with an eyebrow that might have been drawn with a yellow marker, it could have been nothing else.
The first rarities recorded were, in fact, American, two buff-bellied pipits which were probably migrating to South America when they were caught in a strong north-westerly and ended up here. My identification guide says this species has been recorded only once in Europe. Soon afterwards, the eastern birds began to arrive, a citrine wagtail from Poland, the first-ever little bunting, from the Himalayas, an Isabelline shrike from Turkmenistan, a short-toed lark from the Caspian and red-throated Pipits from the Arctic coast of Scandinavia.
Eight individuals of our tiniest bird, the firecrest wren, were spotted. There were ring ouzels, a greenish warbler and four red-breasted flycatchers. It was a birdwatcher’s dream.
Merlins, small birds of prey, followed the bird-stream east, and six were spotted, with one marsh harrier. One merlin chased and caught a skylark, only to be robbed of it by another and then to be chased by a peregrine falcon itself.
Sea-watching one stormy day, my friend Wolstenholme spotted a soft-plumaged Petrel, one of the rarest birds on earth, with just 30 pairs breeding in the mountains of Madeira. Other rarity finders mentioned in dispatches were Ballard, Duggan, O’Keefe, Shorten and Mullarney. Bird-spotting is hard work; they were out at dawn and didn’t hang up their binoculars until sunset.
As the rarities blew in, so did excited twitchers from everywhere.
Killian Mullarney, internationally recognised as the doyen of bird illustrators, arrived to record the voice of the buff-bellied pipit and meanwhile found a Blyth’s reed warbler, another first for Ireland, breeding in Pakistan and usually found in South India and Bangladesh — certainly not in Crookhaven — at this time of year. While the rare but regular yellow-browed warblers (six or eight in the whole country most years) were to be found in, literally, every bush (some 500 on Mizen Head alone) the fall of regular migrants was prodigious. Thousands upon thousands of siskins, redpolls and chaffinches arrived from Scandinavia.
The other afternoon, as I walked down a lane, so many were the small birds feeding on the bushes dense with haws that, panicking at my approach, the whir of their wings drowned out all other sounds. Beyond was waste ground over which fed moving carpets of linnets, redpolls and goldfinches, pecking the earth or swinging acrobatically from the dead heads of ragwort, dock and oil-seed rape. The ranker the land, the more the birds. Such weeds feed thousands. Alarmed by my presence, they passed in a great rush of air overhead.
Elsewhere in west Cork, the sprats and herrings were shoaling and the whales were spouting, and sea birds were feasting on the fish stunned but not swallowed by whales.
Birds present — many of which should have long since gone south — were manx, cory, great and sooty shearwaters, Arctic, long-tailed, pomarine and great skuas, storm petrels and a single little tern.
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