The beauty of birds captured in portrait

ANOTHER LIFE: 'THE FROSTY carpal bar, broad 'thin as paper' wings, all-dark underwings, and sticklike dangling legs. Sweet Mother of God, this was it –­ the first live Wilson's seen off Ireland . . ." Fifty miles out in the Atlantic from southwest Cork, a trawler-load of young birders on a "pelagic" excursion leaped to pour a barrel of chum ­– oily, rancid fish-scraps –­ into the sea, to lure the little petrel into staying within camera range.

The passion of the dedicated, travel-anywhere birder and his ecstatic rewards (it is almost exclusively a male pursuit) seems a fitting topic for a new year in which any escape to the natural world must have a lot going for it. And a new book by an archetypal devotee gives both a brilliant understanding of the calling and many good reasons for showing it better respect. “I’m supposed to be fair game for those who wish to poke fun at me for being eccentric,” writes Anthony McGeehan, regretting the media’s reach for the term “twitcher”, thus alienating him from a multitude “unbrushed by the wings of natural history”.

McGeehan is warden of the nature reserve on Belfast Lough, thronged in winter with flocks of migrant Arctic waders. He is also a gifted photographer, patient sound recordist and engaging storyteller. In Birding from the Hip(Stg £29.95 from The Sound Approach, with two CDs clipped inside the cover), he collects and illustrates the best of his (often very entertaining) columns for birding magazines, and also narrates them on the CDs for bed-time listening, with music and relevant bird-calls.

The book also holds delightfully waspish contributions by his wife Maireád, a classic birding widow and mother. Her husband is supposed to pay for his obsessions and trips away with the lads by doing the hoovering and washing-up and spending time with the children, a bargain not always adequately fulfilled. She dreads the excited phone messages that whisk him away to distant rarities, especially when she jots them down wrongly (“Ring Bill Gull in Belmullet” was Ireland’s first ring-billed gull; he nearly missed it).

A group photograph of a score of “the lads”, drawn to a rocky slope of Cork’s Mizen Head by the sighting of an isabelline wheatear, rather confirms the stereotype: anoraks, woolly caps and telescopes on tripods.

They all look supremely happy, even before the pub, brimming with technical expertise and the thrill of ticking another rarity for their life-lists, and the camaraderie shines out, too.

Just where birding shades into ornithology, the exacting scientific knowledge of birds, their distribution, populations and behaviour, is sometimes hard to know. McGeehan’s passion for watching birds began “on the cusp of my teens”, when a pair of Wellingtons were what he most wanted for Christmas. But even late-comers to birding become skilled in marshalling details that identify storm-swept autumn waders or warblers from North America, or a vagrant wagtail from Siberia paddling in a puddle on the coast of Donegal.

Birding from the Hipis hip indeed to birds with a "split supercilium", "a hint of rufous on the scapulars" or even "semi-palmations between the toes", but McGeehan insists "it's not what it looks like, it's how it makes you feel". He writes of America's hermit thrush as "a little gall of a bird with a kind eye and a rusty tail [and] such a song that, when the bird stopped singing, you felt like whispering Amen". His photographs are of exceptional quality. As a bird's name, that of a black-tailed godwit may not impress, but one turns the page to his portrait of the wader, taken at Belfast a couple of springs ago, with a gasp at sheer beauty.

In modern eruption of Irish birding, the exquisite close-up images made possible by telescopic digital photography have been matched by work of painters such as Killian Mullarney and Michael O’Clery. And birds have continued to inspire outstanding Irish sculptures such as those, in gleaming metal, by the late Conor Fallon.

Among my presents at Christmas came a curlew carved in wood by Norman Styles at his workshop in Grangecon, Co Wicklow. His sculptures are shaped from fallen timber found in local demesnes or native woodlands and “given life again”, as he says, under his chisel. Thus, my curlew has plumage curved to the grain of walnut, sleek and caressable, a bill of dark bog-oak from Kerry, and a base of golden yew from Grangecon Demesne itself: a companionable bird of imposing presence and grace. See the work at www.normanstyles.com.

EYE ON NATURE

Eye on Nature this morning is a requiem for the huge flocks of Scandinavian thrushes, particularly the redwings, that arrived in this country since Christmas hungry and exhausted, fleeing before the Arctic weather. They streamed across the northern continent into Britain, and kept coming westward, driven by the search for food, into southern Ireland and beyond. Eye on Nature had reports from almost every county in Ireland.

On January 6th, Julian Wyllie reported in the Irish Birds Network that redwings and fieldfares were passing west over Sherkin Island at the rate of 100 per minute.

On January 10th, Michael O’Clery reported 20,000 redwings, 5,000-6,000 fieldfares arriving off the sea at Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry. But these birds were not alone; he also saw up to 2,000 blackbirds and song thrushes, 1,200 snipe, 22 woodcock and 200 lapwing.

And on January 11th, Peter Wolstenholme recorded in the IBN, the cliffs at Courtmacsherry, Co Cork were covered with hundreds of similar birds “so tired that we were able to pick up the featherweight waifs which almost expired in our hands”. Some reached the west Mayo coast where some food was available, but many died after their efforts.

Other birds also sought food in unusual places. Mark Helmore observed snipe foraging in mulched rose beds in Co Clare.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail : viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.