I am currently staying in Courtmacsherry, where, I am seeing such an amazing variety of birdlife that it’s overwhelming. And it’s exhausting. Yes, I experience such intense happiness that I experience exhaustion, there are so many weird, wonderful and amazing birds down here that sometimes my brain just goes, “That’s enough for today, recharge by staring at paint drying and we’ll go birdwatching again tomorrow.”
But, all of this happiness also has a painful sadness to it. I keep a list of birds I have seen for the first time. Technically I may have seen them before, but at the time I didn’t know what bird I was looking at, or because I didn’t have a list at the time, and was less interested in birdwatching when I was younger, I’d forget that I’d seen that particular bird. When I photograph a new bird, and get an I.D on it, I add it to the list. The list had 51 birds on it before I left for Courtmacsherry, and now it’s up to 64. So, let’s look at the birds I’ve added to the list since arriving.
Widgeon: Amber Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/wigeon/
Shellduck: Amber Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/shelduck/
Great Northern Diver: Amber Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/great-northern-diver/
Lapwing: Red Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/lapwing/
Greenshank: Green Conservation Status. Green! Does it get better from here! Hint, no it doesn’t.
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/greenshank/
Shag: Strangely enough Birdwatch Ireland doesn’t have an entry for the shag, but the British Trust of Ornithology has declared the shag to be amber listed. It’s a safe bet that the shag is in similar or worse danger in Ireland, given the similar climate and similar problems of environmental damage:
https://www.bto.org/understanding-birds/birdfacts/shag
Rock Pipit: Green Conservation Status. Two so far, YAAAAAAAY!!!!!! I don’t know how to type YAAAAAAAY!!!!!! sarcastically
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/rock-pipit/
Turnstone: Amber Conservation Status. Good, I was worried things were getting too optimistic there with my two birds on the green list!
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/turnstone/
Great Crested Grebe: Amber Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/great-crested-grebe/
Green Winged Teal: Green Conservation Status. Note: This is a rare visitor from America, so Ireland can’t take credit for the fact that this one is doing okay!
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/green-winged-teal/
Chough: Amber Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/chough/
Redwing: Red Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/redwing/
Brent Goose: Amber Conservation Status
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/brent-goose-light-bellied/
So, out of 13 birds, only 3 are on the green list, and one of them the Americans can take credit for. (Ironic, since climate change denial is so popular over there, but anyway.) So really, out of all the new birds I’ve encountered since I arrived, Ireland has managed to provide a safe home for just two birds.
A few days ago I stood on the pier in Courtmacsherry, and looked over to the sandbank on the other side of the water. There I saw the biggest gathering of curlews I have perhaps ever seen since I got into birdwatching. This was their sound:
https://soundcloud.com/user-429211267/2025-01-03-14-34-curlews
And then they all took off together, I got the camera ready as quickly as I could and took this:
Lucky to get this shot.
I was so exited I started audibly vocal stimming paying no mind to whether or not other people could hear me or not. Maybe the people who don’t react joyously to curlews are the weird ones! I think you can predict where I’m going with this. Yep, curlews are on the red list too.
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/curlew/
And I can’t fully process that. The best way I can describe the curlew going extinct is, if I were to imagine one of my favourite places in the world, just gone. If the Nagle mountains were gone, they just, up and vanished. Or if the Courtmacsherry Estuary just, vanished, can’t visit it anymore.
And in a sense, that’s what’s in danger of happening. Part of the estuary being so special, part of what makes it what it is, in danger of disappearing forever. Despite the intrusive sounds of car engines, the estuary would not be the same if you couldn’t hear the haunting sound of the curlew. It would be like from this point on you can only watch your favourite film with the sound off. A really important part of what makes it what it is, gone forever.
This is an oystercatcher.
The best colours!
I’ve loved seeing the oystercatchers around Courtmacsherry since before I was even into birdwatching. Their colourful appearance always brings a smile to my face. And, yeah, you guessed it:
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/oystercatcher/
What about the lapwing!
Never has the word “splendid” been more appropriate for a bird.
The lapwing is Ireland’s national bird! I’m confident given its important status that it’s on the greenlist! Of course it’s on the greenlist! I would be foolishly wasting everyone’s time if I was to check whether or not the lapwing is in danger or not! Alright, even though I feel indescribably silly for doing so, I’m going to check and, ohhhhhhhh.
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/lapwing/
The national bird of Ireland is on the redlist! Just think of the weird implications of that. The national bird of Ireland might have to be changed in a few decades, or possibly in a few years, because all of them are dead!
I live in Cork City, where as a child, going to the Lough and feeding the birds was a big part of the Cork childhood experience. If you met a child who had never done this, you would assume they were from somewhere very far away, such as the planet Venus, or Dublin. And two of the characters you were most likely to meet at the Lough, were these two!
Good afternoon, I’m a mute swan, temporarily breaking my vow of silence just to talk to you!
This photo was actually taken at the Lee Fields, because I can’t remember off the top of my head where my Lough swan photos are. I take a lot of photos! The other character you’d often encounter at the Lough, was this fellow!
Good afternoon human, I hope you’re having a quacking good time!” (You’ve no way of proving that ducks wouldn’t say this if they could talk.)
So yeah, going to the Lough to feed the mute swans and the mallards, is a quintessentially Cork part of any childhood. And it always will be! It will never change! Ever! Ohhhhhhhhh.
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/mute-swan/
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/mallard/
I only learned this about a month ago, and I still can’t believe it. The mute swan, and the mallard are on the amber list! When I started my project of photographing and identifying fifty birds, written about here:
I deliberately didn’t include mallards and mute swans as “proper sightings”. Not because I don’t like these birds, but because I’ve know about them since I was a very small child, they just didn’t seem to count as sightings.
You learn these two birds exist, as a child, not as an expert bird watcher, hell, not even as a novice bird watcher, you just always know that they’re there. To me, the extinction of the mute swan or the mallard, would be comparable to the extinction of dogs, or cats, or horses.
It would be the extinction of birds that your brain takes as an indisputable fact that they exist.
Imagine a father taking a stroll with his children around the Lough, and explaining that there used to be these birds called mute swans and mallards. The father explains how his mother and father took him to feed these birds too. Perhaps even this tradition went back to his grandparents, or great grand parents. When the children ask, where are these birds now, the father has to explain that there are none left, anywhere, they are gone.
In fact, so many birds are in danger in the Lough, that the only ones that are green listed are the feral pigeons, and some, not all, of the gulls. I love both of these birds, but something would be seriously missing from the Lough if the mute swan, and the mallard, and the tufted duck, and the northern shoveller, and the coot all vanished from there forever.
A few years ago this obnoxious trend started of people saying their childhood was ruined if, I dunno, in the next Superman film his pants was different or something. But, I think more than half of the birds in the Lough going extinct, DOES constitute a ruined childhood!
Do you ever reflect on the fact that the passenger pigeon is gone? Neither do I, I mean, sometimes I do, but it’s not like I reflect on it on a daily basis. And that scares me, for the new generation, curlews and oystercatchers being nowhere to be seen could just be “normal”, and for the generation after that, mallards and mute swans being gone could just be “normal” and so on and so forth. The birds might not just disappear from our planet, they might disappear from our collective memory. Indeed, on another environmental topic, light pollution, I took it for granted, as an indesputable fact, that from Cork City you can’t see the Milky Way, even though I was later told that several decades ago you could you see it from the city. I was born in 1985, and the poor quality of our skies is my “normal”. Could the mass destruction and extinction of so many animals become “normal” for the next generation?
Of late one of my favourites birds has become the chough.
Stylish beak!
Something I’ve wondered about since well before I got into birdwatching is, do birds enjoy flying?The fact that it seems like an awesome experience doesn’t necessarily mean that they do. Getting your body to defy gravity is an extremely physically difficult task, maybe they view flying as laborious and difficult. It might explain why some of the aquatic birds don’t fly too much, why fly when you can float? Or, a bird might view flying the way we view walking, do all humans enjoy walking? Or, it could be that their brains are wired so differently from ours, that they simply don’t enjoy things that a human might enjoy. However, there’s evidence that choughs don’t just fly because it gets them from A to B, but, because they love it!
Having the time of their lives!
Look at the article on choughs from Birdwatch Ireland:
https://birdwatchireland.ie/birds/chough/
Choughs perform barrel rolls and fly upside down. You could argue there’s some other reason why they do this, but I think, and of course there’s no way to know for sure, that the reason they perform these aerobatic stunts is because they love it!
Now, look at the rest of the article on choughs and become sad at once.
Yep, they’re on the amber list.
Imagine if humanity went extinct. Imagine all of the wonderful, amazing, magical experiences that would never happen again. Nobody would ever again be moved to tears by a piece of music. Nobody would ever again stare in awe at the stars in a light pollution free sky. Nobody would ever again experience the elation of hearing their child’s first world. Experiences, would be lost, forever. And the same can be true when animals go extinct.
If the chough goes extinct, the wonderful elation of doing barrel rolls and flying upside down will be an experience that is gone forever, never to be experienced again.
Or look at this video about great crested grebes:
The courtship dance of the grebes sounds like a wonderful experience, and, if the great crested grebe goes extinct (they’re amber in Ireland), this is something that will never be experienced again.
How many joyous, wondrous, amazing things, could never happen again, because the animals that experience them have been wiped out forever?
It would be an awful thing indeed if the joy of reading a good book, or playing a musical instrument, or watching the sunrise, were never experienced, ever again. And I hope we can feel the same about the amazing things that animals enjoy every day. We have a choice, do we want to talk about the curlew, the oystercatcher, and the lapwing, as part of our daily lives, or in the same sentence as we talk about the dodo, the great auk or the passenger pigeon? Too many animals have vanished forevermore, I hope humanity can learn to live in harmony with our wonderful wildlife, before it’s too late.
Ponderings Of An Autist 
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