Another Life: Twitching for ticks – a tale of addiction

It is usually enough for me to write about the weather to have it change utterly by the time the column appears. So it may be right to share a website prediction of the north Atlantic jet stream roaring across Ireland this weekend when it should, it seems, on historical average, be harassing the Mediterranean.

Big winds would at least restore support to my lifelong belief in “equinoctial gales”, clustering stormy days and nights around a seasonal shift of the sun. I now rather resent the term being called “a common misconception” by the weather statisticians, smugly counting in all the gales that haven’t fitted.

The keenest expectations of gales are those that excite the twitchers and birders among us. The first westerly weather fronts, equinoctial or not, are what carry the young migrants of rare species off their compass courses down the coast of North America and land them, exhausted, in Cork and Kerry instead.

Gales, too, bring Atlantic migrants within telescope range of birders perched damply on Irish cliff tops.

Eric Dempsey spent many such thrilling autumn sea watches. One, on Clear Island, dawned "wet and wild. Strong southerly winds, gusting to storm force, along with prolonged periods of heavy rain, battered the coast. It was an ideal morning to risk our lives and head out to Blanan. In near darkness, we made our way out to the tip. The seabird passage was superb, with lots of Sooty Shearwaters and Great Skuas. The best bird for me, my first Pomarine Skua, passed so close to where we were sitting I could almost reach out and touch it".

This is from Dempsey's new book, Don't Die in Autumn (Gill & Macmillan, €16.99), a memoir of a life devoted to birds. Its title arises from a jokey (but eventually moving) pact that Dempsey had with his dad, an enviable father who backed his son in giving up a well-paid job to try to make a living from birds. The book is so honestly and joyously written that adding bird pictures to it would have marred its distinction.

Dempsey entered Ireland's birdwatching world at a lively stage of its history. The original Irish Wildbird Conservancy was well on its way to the now-popular passion of BirdWatch Ireland, and squadrons of young "twitchers" were already racing about the island in pursuit of new ticks for their life lists. Nearly 20 years earlier I had turned up, as a would-be member, to a conservancy gathering upstairs in a central Dublin pub. Offered somewhat puzzled regard from the assembled two or three elderly gentlemen, veterans of Irish ornithology, I felt foolishly out of place and fled.

Dempsey has given more than 30 years of service to the conservancy and BirdWatch Ireland, maturing in the process from twitcher to birder, an author with Michael O’Clery of notable field guides, and an enthusiastic lecturer. But the power of his memoir lies in the hectic brotherhood and rivalry of twitching, when driving from Dublin to Clear Island, in west Cork, and back in one day seemed worth it, just to add another first to the list.

The island, with its long-established observatory, offers close encounters not only with storm-swept seabirds but also with vagrant American shrikes, warblers, pipits and crakes, resting in its bushy hollows. “You got your tick,” Dempsey tells, “you got your bird. Hours would then be spent watching it, learning the key features, taking in the way it moved and behaved, photographing it or sketching it, and taking notes. The whole experience was intense. The high of successfully ‘connecting’ with a rare bird is incredibly addictive. A mega could keep you going for weeks.”

His graduation from lifts in other people’s cars to guiding American birdwatching groups and encouraging the children of national schools has been long earned. He maintained BINS, a website updated by mobile phone that, for a small charge, was the epicentre for Irish news of the latest birds. It was monitored also by twitchers in the UK, all too eager to travel if they could trust the identification. Once, reporting a brown shrike he was watching in Co Kerry, Dempsey was phoned from Britain: “Eric, there’s about a hundred of us here at the airport, and we’ve chartered a flight. We’re relying on your word.”

Such wide esteem, however, had its off days, including one that “utterly changed” Dempsey’s birding life. In October 2006, on Cape Clear for speaking and guiding engagements, he was desperate to see the orange-bellied Baltimore oriole sighted in an island garden. Finding his view blocked by a gang of intently watching young birders, he begged for a look through someone’s telescope – a normal courtesy on such occasions. “Lads, I can’t see it,” he pleaded, but nobody offered or even looked up. And with that, to his surprise and relief, he was set free of the addiction of mere twitching.