It was a typical midsummer morning of 1997. On the Bull Island, across from Dollymount in Dublin, nothing much stirred. The lifeguard in his shed on the chilly, deserted beach had nothing at all to do.

An occasional learner-driver guided a car cautiously through the huge puddles on the causeway road. Sometimes moisture wept from the sky sometimes it did not. There was hardly any difference between the states of rain and not-rain. The sand in the dunes was grey and wrinkled as elephant-hide. Wild flowers in the sodden grass were dulled. Nondescript brown birds did whatever those small birds do . .

.

Nondescript, that is, before. Because after - after Richard

Collins, bird-person supreme, has stood on the spot and shown you how to open your eyes - no bird is nondescript again. And those brown birds, some of them, were larks. Which is what I was down the Bull

Wall to learn about.

Larks. After a lifetime of being satisfied with the most miserably meagre bird knowledge - how to tell crows, magpies, sparrows, robins, blackbirds and a load of different seabirds, all of which I called seagulls - I wanted to know more, especially about ordinary, everyday birds. I picked larks because the trilling and squealing of larks high in the air is the soundtrack to the Irish summer - the very sound of fresh air.

Now I know something true, yet altogether magical, about the skylark's song. Because Richard stood there in the dripping marram grass and pointed up at a little quivering fountain of sound, far up in the sky. "Imagine the air beneath that lark, the air the song is filling, as a cone. Well, that cone of air and the ground it rests on is what the lark is claiming. He's saying - "where my song covers is my real estate. Other male larks - trespassers will be prosecuted.

Female larks - see what a wealth of resources I have . . ." Richard moved on, along through the dunes, looking up. Suddenly, because he could see them, there were larks everywhere, even though the monotonous, drizzly morning hadn't changed.

"Look at the liquid motion of their wings," he said fondly, gazing up at the brown dots. "Look at how substantial they are!"

I gained confidence. "There's one!" I said. "No, that's a starling." Oh dear. You'd think I'd know a starling.

"Well, isn't that one?" "No. That's a meadow-pipit. You can tell because its wing motion is much more jerky than the lark's." Oh.

"Well - there's one!" I tried, again. "That's a reed-bunting, actually," Richard said.

The nightmare difficulty of ornithology - of needing to know everything before you can know anything - opened up before me again.

I think I'm going to have to be satisfied with nearly knowing about larks.

But funnily enough, I know about kittiwakes. Because by now the day was getting really wintry, and you could barely make out Howth

Head across the bay.

"I tell you what," Richard said. "We'll go and see the kittiwakes.

They've lost thousands and thousands of kittiwakes in England, in unseasonable gales."

We were on Howth in 10 minutes, making our way down the turf to a spur, far below the path, from which - bird people like Richard know

- you have a perfect view of a kittiwake colony. I slid down on my back. Another layer of wet and mud would make no difference.

I was shaking: there was far too much air beneath me, and a cold sea. But when Richard set up the telescope, and I clung to it, and put the eyepiece to my eye, a most wonderful scene leapt towards me.

There, on the ledges of the next cliff along, were rows and rows of pure-white kittiwakes - the ones with little round black eyes, and elegant yellow legs, that you see out at sea when you're going over and back to Britain on the boat.

And peeping out from under the white flanks were little balls of fluff, little kittiwake fledglings. They looked cosy and well, there under Howth Head. And they deserve to be. Richard Collins explained that such is the competition for the fishy resources there, between birds coming in from the ocean to breed, that kittiwakes observe the strictest family planning. They "marry" late, like the Irish used to do. Just as the Irish skylark sings more than your foreign skylark.

Although they're world citizens, some birds simply seem more Irish than others. Maybe I could master birds if I just did the Irish ones?

"How many kinds of birds are there in Ireland?" I asked, full of new enthusiasm. "Well," Richard said, "I suppose there are about 150

species here . . ." The present position then is: work begun on the lark and the kittiwake; 148 birds to go.