BEING THERE:Stepping onto the pretty platform by the sea, it's impossible to miss the trill of the skylark.Welcome to the world of the birdwatcher.
THE DART SCREECHES to a stop and commuters head home as a lone little egret, all elegant neck and pure white plumage, dines quietly on Booterstown Marsh, in Co Dublin.
These white herons have been known to dangle their bright yellow feet in the water, all the better to attract prey. This one may even have used the same trick to catch the small fish that is currently trapped in his pointy beak. It's a full 10 minutes before he manages to slip it down his neck in one piece, head first so he doesn't choke. For a brief moment, his thin neck becomes unmistakably fish shaped. Another Dart screeches to a stop. This time you barely hear it. The bird has all your attention now.
Stephen McAvoy owns the birdscope that has brought the little egret's meal, taking place a hundred yards from our vantage point on a path leading to the station, vividly to life. The instrument cost €1,500 a few years ago and was made by Swarovski. ("No, they don't just make jewellery," he confirms with all the patience of a person who doesn't mind waiting hours to get a good look at, say, a red kite.)
Stephen, with his green windcheater and pale green eyes, is a birder. Born in Germany, he came to this country 10 years ago and began serious birdwatching as a teenager the day he spotted a long-tailed skua, an unusual enough sighting for the area, up on Bray Head, Co Wicklow. There it was, perched nonchalantly on a bench. He rang Birdwatch Ireland to report the find and he's been watching birds of all kinds, from Poland to Panama, Sligo to Skelligs, ever since.
He views the marsh with eyes that see beyond the superficial. You or I might take in the roadside expanse of muddy waters, grasses waving in the breeze, maybe a couple of white plastic bags and a discarded basketball. But the likes of Stephen? He'll direct your eyes to the middle distance, where he'll claim a flock of black-tailed godwits are feeding. You'll look down the scope and see dozens of the wading birds, some newly red throated as they change into summer plumage, feasting on the mudflats which are teeming with life. He says the birds are fattening up for the journey to Iceland, where they will breed before returning here in October.
"After a while, you start to notice birds everywhere," he says, in a hybrid accent that has traces of Germany, where he spent his childhood, and Dublin, where he lives, and Sligo, where he went to college to study environmental science.
It's not just birds that preoccupy Stephen. "Nature generally. Butterflies, dragonflies. It opens your eyes to everything. You can just put a feeder up in your garden and watch them there. Or you can go travelling around the country, around the world, looking for more rare examples." A birder friend once drove from Dublin, picked him up in Sligo, and then drove to Tralee just to see an elegant tern. "He drove for 18 hours altogether. It was worth it," he says.
There are about 9,000 species of birds and Stephen has seen around 10 per cent of those and more than half of the 450 species found in this country. He keeps notebooks and reports sightings on various websites. On Booterstown Marsh, we see red shanks, a variety of gulls and some ducks.
The time flies.
A CONFESSION: birds have mostly passed this writer by. Their individual beauty and traditional habits are long lost in the haze of half-remembered primary school nature walks. But spend time with someone such as Stephen, and you start to see, hear and appreciate birds everywhere. The next day, one of the hottest of the year so far, we meet a few of his fellow birders in Kilcoole Marshes, Co Wicklow, where Birdwatch Ireland owns a reserve.
Stepping off on the pretty platform by the sea, it's impossible to miss the trill of what Birdwatch Ireland's appropriately named Niall Hatch helpfully points out is a skylark. A priest once contacted him to say a friend who was dying wanted to hear the bird's song, a soundtrack to his childhood, one more time. He died listening to a CD of the skylark's song. There are worse ways to go.
Birdwatch Ireland has 14,500 members, from casual birdwatchers who observe the feathered action in their garden, to those fully fledged twitchers, obsessive, competitive birdwatchers, about whom more later. "I suppose it's perceived as a nerdy pastime, some people can't see the appeal," agrees Niall, binoculars around his neck. "But for me it's fascinating to see the birds change with the seasons, to see them arrive and leave again. I get enormous pleasure from learning about even common birds. There is so much we don't know about what makes them tick, it's just as engrossing as any wildlife programme."
This, the birders tell me, is an exciting time of year. Dick Coombes points out a large flock of golden plover, maybe 700 birds, more migrants from Iceland who will be off on their travels in a few days' time. In the distance is Djouce Mountain and a well-trodden path that marks the Wicklow Way. He spots a swallow arriving over the sea. "My first, this year," he says, delighted.
Niall explains about Spring Alive, a project in which members of the public can record on a special website (that's been translated into 40 languages) the spread of migrants as they arrive into Europe.
"It's a passion," says Dick, who started birding as a young boy, cycling all over Howth, Bray and Booterstown Marsh, binoculars banging off his handlebars, the strap shortened to make the journey to his eyes that bit speedier.
"There are days you'll come down here and you are always hoping for something unusual, but you settle for a lot less."
Helen Boland, a rare bird herself in the male-dominated birdwatching community, is involved in the wetland bird survey. "This time of year is brilliant," she says. "You are starting to see a whole set of birds you haven't seen since last summer and the others are moving off now."
"Their bags are packed, practically," laughs Dick as, with a whoosh, a massive flock of brent geese takes flight, their magnificent silhouettes swooping against the sky.
Oscar Merne, another keen birder, strolls past. "I was just thinking," he says, "that I've been doing this around 60 years. It started in the winter of 1946/47. It was a year of heavy snows and my sister and I had the mumps.
"My father put food on the birdtable and flocks of redwings and fieldfares came. We ticked them off in our tiny Observer's Book of Birds." He talks about the old days, when the hay fields around Dublin were filled with skylarks and corncrakes, when their competitive, territory marking songs were so loud it would drive you mad.
He talks about the "lunatic fringe" of birdwatching. "Twitchers," he says of those who chase around the world after rare birds, "they get a disproportionate amount of coverage in the media.
"You see these pictures of 500 twitchers staring through a million euro worth of optics, at some little brown waif or stray that has been blown over from a hurricane in America. It gives the impression that this is what birdwatching is about, but it's not . . . we are all very keen bird people, we love birds, we enjoy looking at them, studying them, we participate in surveys. We are not just ticking them off some list."
OSCAR SPEAKS WITH such passion about the little tern colony that will be arriving on this shore from northwest Africa in a few weeks' time, that you make a mental note to return for a look at the end of this month. They nest here on the shingle beach, their pebble-like eggs perfectly camouflaged. Though their numbers are dwindling, it's the biggest colony in Ireland, and, while in the area, they'll be protected by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Merne's former employer.
Later, when Oscar has gone, Dick says he enjoys travelling around the country when he gets the time, on the hunt for lesser spotted birds. "There is," he says, "a little bit of twitcher in all of us." But it's also about seeing birds out of context. Stephen McAvoy remembers watching a rugby match in Lansdowne Road when at half-time a redshank landed in the middle of the field. "It didn't care about the match, all those thousands of people; it was just looking for worms," he smiles.
In Kilcoole, and later in the East Coast Nature Reserve in Newcastle, Co Wicklow, where Birdwatch Ireland has a 220-acre reserve, we see gannets, gulls, pheasant and mallard ducks, shags, knots and another little egret. We see meadow pippits that go "pippit, pippit" and stonechats that have a call like two stones being rubbed together. We see a carrion crow that has flown over from Wales - "your first rarity," says Niall - and we compare and contrast it with our more common hooded crows.
On the way home, we watch a pair of wagtails flitting around Greystones Dart station and Stephen wonders aloud why it is that they wag their tails with such enthusiasm. Yet another one of the bird world's many mysteries.
Then a little girl on the platform points and declares "birdy". "Yes," you tell her, "that's a wagtail."
"Wagtail," she repeats, and you're filled with a silly sort of pride.
Earlier, Niall Hatch had said that the Lidl supermarket chain sometimes stocks a range of surprisingly good binoculars for €16.99. What's even more surprising is that as the train moves, offering views of cliffs speckled with seabirds - some you recognise after a day with the birders - the purchase of a pair of €16.99 binoculars is oddly tempting.
