Wagtails, snipe and dippers, and picture books to dip into

ANOTHER LIFE:IT'S A FEW YEARS since the county council, wanting to make a car park behind the strand, laid a couple of huge concrete pipes in the ford and built a bridge over them. That and a few other changes have left a virtually dry gulch where the mountain river used to babble (or sometimes roar impassably) across the boreen. The rock sill that once sent a cascade glittering and twisting towards the tops of my wellies now stands bare and dead.

Among the many things I mourn about the loss of such a rare and special place is the occasional chance to watch a dipper (the white-throated dipper, as we’re supposed to call it now) walking under water.

Typically a bird of fast, oxygen-rich upland rivers and streams, where stone-armoured larvae of caddisflies – a favourite food – cling to the underwater cobbles, the dipper in Ireland can come right down to the coast, even to the splash zone of the sea. It is the only perching bird that depends so utterly on water. Muscle attachments in its eye lenses help it refocus as it breaks the refractive skin of the water; flaps close to keep the water out of its nose; strong and grasping claws keep a grip on the slippery stream bed as it searches out its food.

For such detailed appreciation I thank Prof John O’Halloran, who, with his students at University College Cork, has made the dipper a focus of research, both for the bird’s own sake and for its relationship with the water quality of upland (often conifer- bordered) streams. Acidification, for one thing, seems to mean fewer breeding dippers.

His guest chapter adds great interest to Freshwater Birds of Ireland(Collins Press, €19.99), already a book that any halfway-smitten birdwatcher would relish for Christmas. The main text is by Jim Wilson and the photographs are by Mark Carmody, a partnership that produced the strikingly good Shorebirds of Irelandin 2009.

From wagtails to herons, grebes to swans and ducks, the book explores the lives of our dozens of species of native waterbird and the host of Arctic and European migrants that join them in winter (an astonishing 500,000 snipe are already on their way). It also adds, somewhat eccentrically, a few “birds from the water’s edge”, among them the cuckoo.

Quite the oddest omission, however, from a book that considers predation, is any mention of the mink, whose ravages among moorhens, coots and others have been a rural tragedy. Even a section on the black-headed gull, while noting a 70 per cent decline since the 1980s, fails to acknowledge the mink’s slaughter of that bird’s breeding colonies on lake islands.

The Collins Press continues its rich contribution to Ireland's natural history with a stunning match for last year's Gill Macmillan offering The Wild Flowers of Ireland, by the botanist Declan Doogue and the photographer Carsten Krieger.

Identical in size, just as weighty and packed with similarly gorgeous floral close-ups, Wildflowers of Ireland: A Personal Record(Collins Press, €29.99) is different mainly for the last bit. Zoe Devlin is, as she insists, an amateur botanist, but also a lifelong lover of flowers and an increasingly skilful photographer who has welcomed the digital age: it's all her own work.

She offers a lifetime of flowers she has found growing in Ireland, which is most of them, with notes on where and when, with a proper botanical CV for each. (The book was launched at the National Botanic Gardens.) She was enthused as a child by being shown an orchid through a magnifying glass, in a Wicklow valley, by the estimable feminist revolutionary Dr Kathleen Lynn. Her own exploration and learning have given her a special feel for how the flower-lover can become more confident and informed. But just to leaf through her book should be a pleasure for anyone.

Collins's third Christmas book is another highly personal project, this time by a zoologist at NUI Maynooth who became fascinated with Ireland's brimming artery of water. The River Shannon(€24.99) traces Aiveen Cooper's journey from the lichen-fringed upwelling beneath the Cuilcagh Mountains in Co Cavan to the final swirl among dolphins off Kilrush in Co Clare.

As a straightforward guide, it has much to relate and describe, for, like the winter floods that spread out from its banks, the river's leisurely progress suits discursive reportage on places, nature, history and myth. The style is cool and factual – one can learn a lot – and Cooper travels rather than experiences. But among the many photographs (not her own) are images that conjure the satisfactions attending a slow summer voyage aboard the barge Niewe Zorgen.

Eye on nature

Why do our eating apples develop a waxy surface on their skins after being picked and stored for a few weeks?

Philip Jacob, Glenageary, Co Dublin

Different varieties of apples have varying degrees of a natural wax coating on their skins. On some the wax increases on storage, which makes them good keepers.

I came across a spider in Sandycove that was not very large. It had orange and white striped legs and a large rotund body, with white dots down the centre of its back.

Eric Rothschild, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin

It was the garden or cross spider, Araneus diadematus, which is common.

In my small garden of herbaceous beds and lawns, I have dispatched 690 slugs. Is this a record?

Roy McNeill, Lisburn, Co Down

While I was shopping for fish in Beshoff’s in Howth recently, a kestrel flew into the shop. Eventually it stunned itself against the glass of the skylight, after which a member of staff carried it carefully to the door, where it recovered and flew off.

Louis Kilmartin, Portmarnock, Co Dublin

Are butterflies deaf?

Mary Regan, Tallaght, Dublin 24

Butterflies don’t have ears but “hear” sounds through their wings, by sensing changes in sound vibrations.

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