A magical pre-dawn vigil rewarded by sight of the rare goosander

If you are not too averse to rising early, the hour before sunrise is a special time. On the slopes above the upper lake in Glendalough, Co Wicklow, it can be very special indeed: there is the promise of seeing a natural drama, unique in this country, unfold before your eyes.

It starts with staring into a black void. Inky water is almost indistinguishable from cliffs that you can only sense, rather than see, above the lake. A squall skittering across the surface whips up flashes of silvery foam; as the minutes pass, it’s increasingly tempting to impose the shape of the slim white birds you are seeking on to these brief flickers of light.

It gets colder every moment you stand still. The thought of hot coffee indoors threatens to overwhelm your commitment to this vigil.

About 45 minutes before sunrise, it is your ears, not your eyes, that confirm the wait will be worthwhile. Once, twice, and then again, a haunting flute-like call echoes around the lake, followed by prolonged clicking coughs.

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It’s several more minutes before you can actually separate a white bird from white wavelets. Even then, you could not swear in court that you are looking at a goosander.

This oddly-named bird is a newcomer to Ireland, a secretive and strikingly beautiful duck. They are fresh-water cousins of the red-breasted merganser, common enough on our coasts and estuaries. Both species are called saw-bills for the “teeth” on their long bills, which help them catch slippery fish.

About two dozen of them, probably most of the Irish population, have picked this lake, once chosen by St Kevin for solitary meditation, as their regular night-time sanctuary from land-based predators.

Light is seeping into the valley quickly now, and you can begin to distinguish the glossy green heads of the males from the duller, but attractively crested, rusty heads of the females, whose grey bodies keep them invisible longer. Goosander swim low in the water and, though larger than a mallard, they can vanish abruptly in the choppy water, just when you think you’ve got a fix on them.

Twenty years ago, you could hardly have got a fix on them them at all, at least not in this country. For centuries, the goosander’s European range was restricted to Scandinavian latitudes. In 1871, they began breeding in Scotland, slowly spreading to England, and then more recently to Wales. Individuals began to show up here in winter, as great rarities on Lough Neagh and the Craigavon lakes, in the 1960s.

Then young were hatched in Donegal in 1969. One or two pairs hung on there for a decade, then vanished. But six goosander together were spotted on the Avonmore, one of Wicklow’s fast-flowing, wooded rivers, their ideal habitat, in 1993. Dick Coombes of BirdWatch Ireland finally found a female with ducklings in tow in 1995.

Since then, numbers have grown only slowly. The highest count on the Glendalough roost is 25 birds. They are such secretive breeders that even Coombes, a highly skilled and dedicated local observer, can only hazard a guess that there are, at the outside, up to four dozen pairs in the county. They are also showing up in Carlow, but apparently not breeding there.

Coombes says there is no obvious explanation for the goosander’s expansion from its previously well-defined range. Like the spread of the collared dove from Turkey, westward all the way to Achill in the later 20th century, he describes it as “one of our great bird mysteries”.

The early morning ritual in Glendalough is one more reason why Wicklow has become a honeypot for bird watchers. The county was always good for winter wildfowl, and for some rare woodland birds in summer. But it now offers the remarkable spectacle of a big, colourful bird of prey – the red kite, reintroduced very successfully in 2007 – displaying and roosting in dozens near Avoca village on any clear winter afternoon.

Meanwhile, the great spotted woodpecker, absent for at least four centuries, chose Wicklow’s oak forests as its bridgehead to colonising the country. They arrived just over a decade ago. The sound of their “drumming”, so characteristic of European forests, is now part of the Wicklow woodland spring soundtrack.

But back to our Glendalough vigil: with each new pulse of light, the goosander get more flighty, more excited. Some rise right up on their rear ends till they are almost vertical, beating the air with their wings.

They sometimes chase each other briefly. Then the whole little flock is moving in one direction – until the leader suddenly turns sharply and swims back through the others. Each individual swings around and follows as he passes. It is as though the group were constantly reweaving itself.

Just before the sun breaks the horizon, one bird suddenly rises right off the water and four more follow it. They circle the lake rapidly, but gain height only slowly, moving as a squadron in tight formation, black and white wings flashing as they reach the brighter air. On their third circuit, now nearly as high as the clifftops, they head off into the mountain river system for the day.

The pattern repeats itself until, 10 minutes before the sunlight touches the lake directly, there is not a goosander left on the water.

Goosander in Ireland are very shy. That’s what makes the dawn display in Glendalough such a great opportunity to get good views of them. Stay hidden though, even in the dark, because if they see you, they’ll be gone.

If you are lucky, you may also find them on rivers like the Avonmore, Avonbeg, Avoca and Clohoge, but it’s likely you’ll glimpse them only in flight. The bridge at Rathdrum, the white bridge near the Avoca mines, and the Meeting of the Waters are promising spots.

Their courtship and mating, very rarely observed here, is a model of mutual seduction that could teach our species a thing or two. And if you are extremely fortunate, in springtime you just might catch an even rarer sight: a mother, swimming, with piebald ducklings on her back.

Goosander are well worth getting up for. They are not only exceptionally beautiful, but a sign of hope in an era shadowed by extinctions.

To the water and the wild 

Goosander success limited by return of a native

Dick Coombes of Birdwatch says that the fish in Wicklow’s mountain rivers must suit the goosander’s diet very well. “If prey was limited, they would be long gone.”

But their numbers are now barely increasing, despite some human help. Ann Fitzpatrick of the National Parks and Wildlife Service says that, as soon as breeding was established, the service put up nest boxes for them.

“They nest in holes in big, old trees and there are not many left on these rivers.”

Some nest boxes are used every year, but soon the National Parks and Wildlife Service found they were also being occupied by a predator, the pine marten. This is a native species that has made a strong comeback in the county recently and is well equipped to take eggs and young birds.

So Fitzpatrick and her colleagues now put metal sleeves around the trees under the boxes, too slippery for the marten to climb.

It’s one of the painful consequences of the biodiversity crisis that, with populations so low, the success of one species threatens the survival of another, at speeds far faster than normal evolutionary competition.