Soaring choughs brave the stormy weather

Another Life Ever since its installation on the kitchen window sill, our RF Animation Weather Forecast gizmo has promised nothing but gloom, its black-rimmed LED clouds convulsing with electronic rain.

A Christmas present from a friend, a connoisseur of gadgets, it takes its cues from an outside sensor that measures temperature, humidity, hectopascals and whatever, and beams it all in through the window.

If I were a city executive, it would make another toy for the desk, offering at a glance the conditions beyond the windscreen on the drive home.

As it is, all-too-real gales and hail squalls greet our morning sorties with nuts for the birds, and a routine tap at the barometer's needle in the porch tells me all I want to know about the weather ahead.

All night, a storm from the north-west roared like a pulsing dragon above the roof. It is a decade or more since I saw the sea so angry as now.

The apron of foam is as broad as the strand itself, and the breakers that feed its whiteness are erupting above offshore reefs we didn't even know were there. A huge swell seethes around the islands, mere grey shadows in a murk of spray. Humidity 70 per cent, says the RF gadget, but nothing about the salt I can taste, just licking my lips.

Storms and spring tides together chew away at the soft edge of the fields behind the strand, so that fence-posts fall and dangle until their next hammering in, a few more metres in retreat across the grass. The storms have scoured sand away from whole beaches on this coast, exposing terraces of ancient, glistening peat. You'd have to live here to trust in its return, once the waves' great paddle wheels slow down in spring and swing into reverse.

Working out the historical advance of the sea is a study in itself, but now climate change has moved the goal posts. As the rise in sea level gets under way, I redraw the map of our shore in my mind, flooding the salt-marsh, the machair and seaward fields, dissolving the dunes into a sand-spit and running the tide into the lakes. Ironically, there's a real map of 150 years ago that shows a topography not much different from this: a lesson in the wilful dynamics of the shore.

It's possible, of course, with the tsunami fresh in mind, to grow alarmed at what the sea might do. A reader in Dublin's Sandymount sends me cuttings about the human destruction of mangroves (for shrimp farms and tourist resorts) that left many shores of the Indian Ocean fatally exposed.

She is concerned, not without reason, that sand and gravel banks that give natural protection from storm surges in Dublin Bay might be scooped away to serve construction and development. This must, of course, not happen: there have been enough expert warnings. But how amazing that the National Seabed Survey has yet to reach Dublin's doorstep, just as money begins to run out.

Back on the wild western shore, some bird network news has sent my thoughts to a bird I would love to choose for my coat of arms (being lauded in Latin can bring on strange fantasies). Buoyant, brave and elegant with its bright vermilion bill and legs, the chough is supremely heraldic: when the birds still survived in Cornwall, Thomas á Becket had three on his shield, so that a "beckit" is now the term for a chough in the coat-of-arms trade (sable on azure, chevrons argent, all that).

The bird update was from the Donegal coast, where Nick Gray and his young colleagues are studying the chough population from Glencolumbkille northwards as part of a survey for BirdWatch Ireland. The winter flocks of this hardy crow shelter in the lee of sand dunes, and "roost counts have been grabbed between, and sometimes amidst, the almost non-stop gales buffeting and washing over the west. The birds don't hang around near the roost in these conditions and the dusk arrival or dawn exodus from even the larger communal roost sites can be a real blink-and-you'll-miss-it affair.

Donegal has a good many of Ireland's choughs, but the Dingle Peninsula remains the chief stronghold, with more than 100 birds roosting together these nights at the Magherees - an occurrence possibly unique in north-west Europe. On my Mayo shore a flock of a dozen is an event, but no less uplifting. No other bird I know enjoys the wind so much, embracing it ecstatically with deep-fingered wings, even in a gale. As for hail-stones, perhaps they serve to burnish Pyrrhocorax with that wonderful purple sheen (the choughs of drier climates, it seems, make do with a gloss of green).

Nick Gray would like to hear about big flocks of choughs - say 20 or more - sighted anywhere (try his mobile: 087-245 4998).