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.