Another Life: The first flock of young starlings was conjured from nowhere a couple of weeks ago, a sudden dark blizzard erupting over the hedge like a fighter squadron on a practice strafing run, the shocking rush of wings making one's heart leap.
The flocks build up from dozens, into 50s and occasionally 100s, and the aerobatics relax a bit as summer wears on. I like the way they sift down, as if on escalators, to feed among the sheep on the machair.
These are all local juveniles, drably brown and not long fledged from nests in farm buildings or even the distant town. What brings them to this open hillside may be explained as a foraging manoeuvre, but I cling to my first intuition that they need safe room in which to practice being starlings. They start by hedge-skimming and wall-hopping; eventually, and in company with migrants from Europe, their swirls of togetherness will mesmerise a whole winter sky.
The summer swish of starlings - coinciding with a glimpse of Charles Haughey stalking the mist on Inishvickillane - reminded me of another sparrow-sized species of disconcerting habit. A year or two before he bought the island, I was camped there alone in June, my tent pitched in the lee of a dry stone wall. Low churring, crooning and hiccuping sounds advised me that storm petrels were nesting in its depths, and around midnight the darkness vibrated with eerie calls as birds returned from the ocean to relieve their mates. Some, colliding with the tent, slid and scrabbled down it, and, as I crawled out with flash lamp and tape recorder, they skimmed the ground like swallows and dashed about my head. On the recording, my own involuntary cries mingled with those of the petrels.
Some 100,000 pairs of these birds nest in summer on Ireland's more remote and rat-free Atlantic islands, sometimes around abandoned human homesteads. In Inishmurray: Island Voices, Joe McGowan's recent book, Sligo naturalist Don Cotton tells how the petrels have built up to more than 500 pairs since the people left in 1948, and the beguiling underground sound, if not the sight, of the birds is the hope of some of the visitors McGowan takes out to the island from Mullaghmore (you can e-mail him at joe_mcgowan@hotmail.com).
Most of Ireland's stormies, however, nest on the Blaskets: the 27,000 pairs on Inishtooskert are possibly the biggest nesting colony in the world.
These very healthy totals emerged from the Seabird 2000 census, when agile volunteer counters scaled the island cliffs. They, too, carried tape recorders, but used them to play petrel calls at the mouth of every likely burrow, evoking a response from the depths of rock piles and hummocks of sea pinks.
The petrels' nocturnal use of the islands avoids attack by gulls. The strategy is shared by their much larger tube-nosed cousins, the Manx shearwaters, whose gliding flight uses the air currents that follow the crests and hollows of the ocean. How they come to be called Manx, when that is not actually their parish, and how their Latin name, Puffinus puffinus, came to be attached to another seabird altogether, would take too many words. Puffin Island off Kerry is, as it happens, the major Irish stronghold of the Manx shearwater, with perhaps 10,000 pairs, and it also holds thousands of storm petrels, but it is the large colony of puffins that gives the island its name.
Like the range of its ocean travels, the shearwater's potential lifespan is prodigious: a bird trapped at the Copeland Islands Bird Observatory off County Down in 2003 had been ringed 50 years before - a northern hemisphere record. The species also has a summer ritual that still intrigues biologists. The breeding birds may fly 200 miles in search of fish, but each evening, an hour or so before sunset, they assemble in great numbers on the sea close to their islands. Not until night falls do they disperse to the dark mass of the cliffs.
Here they have their own brand of spookiness: a wild, strident crowing that can continue relentlessly for hours. RM Barrington, an eminent Irish ornithologist of the late 1800s, once camped on Skomer Island, off Wales, an island thronged with shearwaters, and was driven to shocking retaliation: "Armed with a stick each, we killed all we could carry - 40 to 50 - in half an hour. Our midnight raid had no effect in quieting the birds, and we got no sleep until after two in the morning." What chance have Dubliners of seeing stormy petrels or Manx shearwaters? According to observers in the Irish Birds Network, distant views of stormies can be had reliably from Skerries, mostly between the islands and Rockabill, during July and August. Manx shearwaters - probably non-breeding birds - can be much more obliging: a small flock flies into Dublin Bay quite regularly on summer evenings and settles on the water to give good views from the north or south walls of the harbour.