Life and learning on a Connemara seashore — including a bird autopsy

Discovering so much information about otters, spotted ray, and guillemots while walking West of Ireland beaches

Anja Murray: Seeing the sea bulge and recede throughout the day is constantly captivating, the sandy inlet below the house showing off its pale sands and giant chunks of granite, before disappearing again beneath teal and turquoise waters. Picture: Failte Ireland

For the past two weeks, I’ve been living by the shore in north Connemara, looking after a friend’s house while they are away. Seeing the sea bulge and recede throughout the day is constantly captivating, the sandy inlet below the house showing off its pale sands and giant chunks of granite, before disappearing again beneath teal and turquoise waters. And each day as I walk the shores, the cycle of tides offers up clues as to what happens within.

For the first few days I was intrigued by the delicate pawprints of otters in the intertidal zone, freshly pressed in fluffy white wet sand each morning, as they travel to and from the colourful lichen-clad rocky outcrops that are cut off from the shore twice each day. Following their tracks, I see that there are often two otters travelling together side by side, assumedly working together for fishing excursions. On part of the shore, just above high-water mark and well away from where humans normally tread, there is a patch of ground where the otters evidently spend much time. There they have a freshwater pool in which to bathe and probably wash their fish. Piles of small rocks adjacent offer ample shelter. And all around this otter place are generous amounts of spraint — the distinctive fish-scented otter dung that is instantly recognisable, full of undigested fish scales and bones of tiny amphibious animals. Otters place it prominently to mark their territory. I have yet to see the otters but am conscious that I am a visitor in their land and I hope I do not disturb their days.

Mermaid's purses washed up on a wintry Connemara shore. Picture: Anja Murray

Another day I was delighted to find several mermaid’s purses among the drifts of washed-up bladderwrack strewn along the upper shore. Mermaid’s purses are the leathery-looking egg cases of some species of shark, skate and rays. I brought one home for closer study, using my trusted Ireland's Seashore: A Field Guide(By Lucy Taylor and Emma Nickelsen, Collins Press). Going by the size (about 7cm long) and the lack of curly tendrils, the ones I have found are from a spotted ray, so I now know that sometime in the recent past, a spotted ray not far offshore laid a little egg in one of these, and left it in a safe place among sea kelp or corals, where the embryo spent about six months developing in this little case before emerging as a stunningly beautiful baby spotted ray. I love to think of this elegant creature now swimming about beneath the waves that I watch each day, with a life expectancy of 18 years or more.

Ireland's Seashore: A Field Guide, by Lucy Taylor and Emma Nickelsen

I am reminded of some of the wonders I discovered about skates and rays when investigating them a few years ago for another project. In addition to the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, skates and rays also have a sense called electroreception — the ability to perceive very small electrical signals. This allows them detect the beating heart of concealed prey beneath the sandy substrate of the seabed.

Measuring the bird found on the shore. Picture: Anja Murray

The following day rambling along the same stretch of shore, I found the body of a dead seabird with a metal ring around its foot. It bore the words ‘Museum Paris’ and a code. With heavy rain incoming and the tide rising, I decided to bring it home for further study. A former ornithologist colleague confirmed it was a common guillemot.

I looked up online how to register a ringed bird, and easily found the ‘ Euring’ portal. I submitted all the details I had about this bird. Within 24 hours I received an email that told me this particular guillemot had been ringed in January 2000 in Brittany, France — just after the new millennium. It was at least 24 years old, quite possibly much older. The oldest a guillemot is known to live is 43 years. The same former colleague suggested it may have been stranded and rehabilitated after a cyclone that occurred in late December 1999 in North-west France. That a rescued and rehabilitated bird survived a further 23 years is heartening to know.

A bird ring. Picture: Anja Murray 

I spent the weekend consulting books and finding out about guillemots. Their breeding colonies are tightly packed, along rocky coasts from Svalbard all the way down the Atlantic seaboard as far south as Portugal. Once paired, they tend to stay together for life, and return to the same ledge each spring for decades.

The young leave the colony before being able to fly — they are brought out to sea and taught to fish by their father. There, they learn to use their wings to swim beneath the waves as well as for flying. Records from ringed birds have revealed that newly fledged chicks can soon fly well, covering distances of 350km in just two weeks!

A pair of guillemots on their nesting ledge. Picture: Richard Mills

Other things we know from ringing is that during winter, guillemots from Britain and Ireland travel south to the Bay of Biscay, as far as 900km from their breeding colonies. Perhaps the guillemot I recovered had been on its return journey, back at the cusp of the new millennium, when it got waylaid by a cyclone. A full 23 years later, this same bird died somewhere off the shores of Connemara.

I was conscious of the plastics that I picked each day from the shore, abundant little bits of plastic rope, bottle tops, shotgun casings, and soft plastic wrapping. I was hoping that this beautiful bird, with such a rich life behind it, had not been killed by consuming plastic litter, as we know many seabirds are. When a friend introduced me the following day to a retired pathologist who lives locally, she agreed to conduct an autopsy on the guillemot.

She found no obvious cause of death. Two small stringy pieces of hard plastic in the stomach were unlikely to be related to the bird’s demise. We assume this guillemot would have been travelling northward toward spring breeding grounds when it finally perished in another winter storm.

It’s a wonder to discover so much from simply strolling along the shore, by looking out for clues of the life all around, even in the midst of stormy winter winds. It helps to be in a place rich with wildlife, and be able to pursue a curiosity with decent books and internet searches — and willing accomplices.