Twitching to see the glossy ibises

I MUST have been the only Courtmacsherry resident not to have seen the flock of 16 glossy ibises that made the bay shore their home from October 4 to October 15.

I spoke of Murphy’s Law last week and I don’t wish to belabour my readers further with its ironies but it is really high comedy that, as the local who reports on nature to the world at large, I should be the single soul not to have witnessed the phenomenon. Ibises in Ireland as rare as hen's teeth, or almost. And so large a flock brought birdwatchers and twitchers from all over the country. But I wasn’t there.

It so happened that on Tuesday [October 4] knowing that at 7am next morning I would be flying to the Czech Republic to visit my son and family, I had spent the afternoon writing my column for the following week. I finished around seven o’clock, emailed the article to Lapp’s Quay, and only then headed out of doors. It was already getting dark. At the end of my road, on the edge of the bay, I found a flock of 10 binocular-wearing, telescope-toting twitchers all in a flap having just watched 12 ibises doing sunset fly-pasts with the local crows and then settling on nearby treetops to preen.

Unfortunately, just two minutes before I arrived, they’d decided it was time to leave the canopy where they had been silhouetted against the sky, and to seek shelter amongst the foliage, there to pass the night invisible to the eyes of the world — and, of course, to mine. Thus, next morning I left without having seen them. Even ibises were not stirring in the foggy darkness at the unearthly hour when we drove up the bay.

While I was in the Czech Republic, twitchers at home joined in heart-fluttering coveys, skeins and gaggles on my local shores, drawn by these rare aves, these strange, stilted-looking creature with bodies like small, slim amphorae, scimitar beaks and spindle legs. Native to the eastern Adriatic, the Black and Caspian Seas, here, in Ireland, these glossy ibises, not yet in their purple-ish adult feathers, might well have been mistaken for a flock of our familiar Little egrets that had suddenly taken to roosting in chimneys. The species are the same size and, but for the ibis’s downturned beak, have the same profile. However, young ibises are black, while little egrets are blinding white.

Upon my return home a week later, I heard that they were still hanging about and had even been seen at close quarters on the beach in front of the Courtmacsherry Hotel, probing the mud for molluscs and crustaceans along with the complement of redshanks, greenshanks, curlews and godwits that regularly roam the sandy or muddy wastes between tides.

My analysis was that they were lost in the fog and had no hope of finding their way back to Morocco, where they would normally winter, given that, on those endless mist-bounds days — with sea fogs as dense as those of the Newfoundland Banks — one couldn’t even see the other side of the bay. Sensibly, they were staying put, and with a bit of luck, I’d come upon them, even if only as vestiges of themselves, their glossy plumage dimmed by Irish damp, no sun penetrating the pea-soupers to polish their feathers.

Subsequently, on travels along the bay shores, I was never without my faithful Jenoptem binoculars, made in the now defunct Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the Stasi-controlled bit of Germany annexed by the Soviets. After the Soviet take-over, Zeiss of Jena continued to make as fine binoculars as their sister firm in west Germany, but costing a fifth of the price. However, clear though the lenses remain after 40-plus years, they revealed no ibises. I went to a spot where they sometimes roosted but was told by an early birder that they had migrated to Clonakilty for the day. One evening, a crepuscular wanderer arriving in the pub told me he had spotted them in a spinney of low trees behind the village. I set off, stumbling up laneways in the dark. I saw a fox and alarmed a pair of roosting pigeons, but there were no ibises. Now they have gone and, clearly, it was my fate never to set eyes on the Courtmacsherry immigrant ibises, although I have seen both Glossy ibises and the severely endangered bald ibis overseas.