Bibles of Ireland's birdie fraternity

ANOTHER LIFE:SUN-BLEACHED and water-stained, its linen cover worn to the spine, a book I bought 44 years ago still earns its place on a shelf above my desk. It's the quick one I reach for to remind me what a brambling looks like, say, or if the garden warbler has an eye stripe (it doesn't). There are many newer, glossier and more elaborate books of the kind, but, for 50 years from 1954, The Collins Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, by Roger Peterson, Guy Mountfort and PAD Hollom, was never out of print as the birdwatcher's vade mecum.

Birdwatchers, not twitchers. Today’s telescope-toting young birders are often impossibly well-versed in the ageing greys of seagulls, or the exact brocades of scapulars and wing coverts that help sort one vagrant American wader from another. Ready to race off to the latest rarity, they are an engaging subculture, mainly of the young.

The achievement of Roger Tory Peterson (an American, too, as it happens) was to invent an illustrative system of simplified bird paintings, with pointers to identifying features, that anyone could follow. Still the mainstay of popular field guides everywhere, it enabled a whole new human relationship with nature, from kitchen-window watchers in the Dublin suburbs to mass gatherings on American hilltops, sorting the autumn hawks as they fly by.

Birdwatching came late to Ireland. In the mid-1960s, when I bought the Collins guide in its ninth, revised edition, concern for birds still went little beyond the conservation interests of wildfowlers and ornithologists. One of the latter, Maj “Robin” Ruttledge, was to become an iconic figure in the Irish Wildbird Conservancy and then BirdWatch Ireland. (He died in 2002, aged 102.) But the popular interest in birds grew largely from a wider awakening to the environment and from the brilliant nature films made by the BBC.

Irish interest in birds at every level of science and skill has vigorously matured, and to set the seal on this there is now, in the new Complete Field Guide to Ireland’s Birds (Gill Macmillan, €19.99) the national “Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom” for birdwatchers, birders and twitchers alike.

It is not the first such venture from the partnership of Eric Dempsey and Michael O’Clery, but it is certainly their most inclusive and accomplished, and one properly tailored to the anorak pocket. Remarkably, Ireland has produced two bird artists of comparable talent: Killian Mullarney, in Wexford, illustrated the prestigious Collins Bird Guide for Britain and Europe, while in Co Kerry Michael O’Clery has now produced paintings of almost 370 species, many of them specially for the Complete Field Guide’s updated text.

The current flux in the classification of birds has already compelled a new edition of the Collins guide. Dempsey and O’Clery have also had to catch up with the arrival of new breeding species (including the great skua, pictured, that nests on one of the islands in my window) and extreme rarities added through the hyperactivity of Ireland’s twitchers. As they mount their telescopes at Ireland’s cliffs and coastal wetlands for this autumn’s wind-blown parade of migrants and vagrants, hearts will no doubt beat in hope for something even newer and rarer.

The unprecedented alliance of ornithologists and Irish hunters in the 1960s was prompted by worry that the clumsy arterial State drainage of rivers was threatening the wetlands of wintering wildfowl. How this unity fell apart can be judged from the scorn for “the birdie fraternity” voiced by the Tipperary hunter-zoologist Douglas Butler in his new book, Wild Duck and Their Pursuit (Merlin Unwin Books, £20).

His unfolding of “one of the greatest con jobs . . . perpetrated on Irish goose shooters” (stemming from estimates of Greenland whitefront populations) is characteristically caustic. But it invigorates a book that has a lot to teach about the natural history of ducks and about the subtleties of shooting’s impact on wildfowl and game birds. With some species, notably geese, shooting adds to natural mortality; in others it becomes “compensatory”, reducing winter competition for food. Mallard duck, says Butler, are next only to red grouse in offering hunters a harvest that does not lead to population decline.

Its author is a lifelong hunter and, like his previous Rough Shooting in Ireland, this book is steeped in experience of a kind unknown to the average “birdy” armed only with binoculars. For all the bluffness and gusto that seem to be traditional to his fraternity – “There are activists who are trying to get the snare outlawed. Ridiculous. . .” – Butler’s knowledge is soberly earned, and chapters such as “Flighting at Dawn”, “Flighting at Dusk” and “Moonlight” are alert to nature in terms much wider in feeling and more evocative than mere ambush of quarry.

Eye on nature

Sunflowers I planted this year have been under attack at the base of their stalks. I saw a wasp at work. Is this common?

Mary-Jo Gilligan, Phibsborough, Dublin 7

Wasps collect plant fibre to build a nest.

We bought a bag of mussels, and when we cooked and opened them a sizeable proportion had tiny crab-like creatures stuck to them or the shells inside. We just picked them off. Are they harmful, and how did they get into the shells?

June Allison, Claremorris, Co Mayo

They were pea crabs, Pinnotheres pisum, which live inside the shells of a number of molluscs, including mussels, and are not harmful. The larva first invades a bivalve called a thick trough shell, where it grows a hard shell. Then it leaves, mates and finds a second host, most often the edible mussel, whose shells open under water. It feeds on food collected by the mussel.

We have spotted an almost entirely white house sparrow, though his beak, legs and eyes are normal.

John Tyler, Waterford

This is a leucistic bird. Leucism is different from albinism, resulting from a deficiency in the pigment cells (while albinism results from a reduction in melanin production). Leucism often causes a piebald effect, but eye colour remains normal.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address