What would bring you to travel in one day, even a day in May, on a huge circuit in County Antrim, starting not too long after midnight from Ballymena and moving, via a bog, Sharvogue's Moss (where the writer, Chris Murphy, tells us that a cuckoo was heard singing at 02.45), and on to Lough Neagh, followed by Lough Beg, all in a dense freezing fog? And we're just starting.
("Was there ever such a cold May?" he asks. Answer it's a most treacherous month.)
He and his companions are, now scrambling over deep ditches, padlocked gates and barbed wire. Later they make for Belfast via Randalstown Forest. Not just Belfast, but Belfast Harbour is investigated, and then they are on their way along the lough shore Greenisland, Carrickfergus, Whitehead, Magheramorne, Larne Lough. They don't give the mileage, but the list of place names would warm the cockles of the heart of the Tourist Board. It goes on the valley of the Bush river, CarrickaRede, Ballycastle and ends in Portballintrae as the north gives out.
The cuckoo mentioned early on may have given the game away. This crew were birders, and very competitive ones. In what was called a county day record, some, others had logged, in one day's journey, no less than 113 different birds in County Down. Chris Murphy's team, four including himself, clocked off in the dark at Portballintrae as was said, to the sound of a sandpiper, having notched, up 119. Most of us are not birders. Some even claim that they know hardly one bird from the other, beyond the few outside the kitchen window. But even people with a moderate capacity for enjoying bird life and flight and song, have to be amazed that in one county and in one day, six score minus one could be encountered and recognised.
The test was that a bird had to, be seen or heard by at least three of the team. What a world of unending wonders we inhabit. And it is good for know while not many of us would know a Glaucous Gull or a Scaup or a Twite.
Chris and many like him do. This is from Wings, the quarterly publication of Birdwatch Ireland, winter edition.