A few weeks ago I did my first ever birding trip to Courtmacsherry in June, technically the tail end of May and the start of June. And it’s a different world then. All of my previous birding trips to Courtmacsherry were in August and December, and of course, the different seasons mean completely different things are happening. Winter, of course, means many of the birds you might see in June are either taking refuge from the harsh weather in warmer climates, or are there, but just don’t sing much, or at all.
As to August, August has always been Summer as far as I’m concerned. The days are long, the weather is often hot, and basically, I do as many Summer related activities in August as I do in June. But in fact, August is Autumn, and you can see this when you do birding during this month. The bird’s Summer activities have already begun to wind down, and many birds that were away for the Summer have already returned.
So this was my first Courtmacsherry birding adventure in the Summer, as opposed to Autumn or Winter, and quite an adventure it was!
I’ll start by talking about one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. I was in Timoleague, by the Estuary, and a hooded crow started flying over a herring gull, trying to look menacing and tough, trying to look like the kind of crow you don’t want to mess with. And the herring gull, doesn’t get angry, doesn’t try to look tough in return, but just looks up, with a look of utter contempt. As if to say, “What are you doing, can you not see that you’re embarrassing yourself? You seriously need to find a hobby.”
“The herring gull is unimpressed”. Perhaps a new meme for our oversaturated internet?
Am I anthropomorphizing a bit? Of course I am. But, at the same time, the herring gull just stood there and stared at the hooded crow, and didn’t seem to be particularly threatened. So a part of me wonders was the herring gull just utterly bemused by the hooded crow’s utterly silly attempt to look tough.
The difference between June and August was quickly apparent in the lack of curlews along the estuary. Here’s one of them, but there weren’t that many.
In fact, I was surprised by how deserted the estuary was in the month of June. From August on, it’s jam packed with birds, meaning I spend a lot of time there. But in June, better to spend your time on the coast, because the estuary is extremely quiet in the Summer.
So the estuary was sparsely populated, deserted in fact, for a lot of the week I spent in Courtmacsherry. But while the estuary was fairly quiet, the ocean and the woods were absolutely full of birds!
In fact, I had a quite lovely experience lying in bed at about 5:00 am, and all of a sudden a song thrush started singing! Like most people, I’m not too keen on loud singing at such an early hour, but I’ll always make an exception for bird song. In fact, the beautiful song of the song thrush, one of my favourite singers, accompanied me for pretty much the whole week. Here are some recordings I took of this lovely singer:
https://xeno-canto.org/admin.php/1144856
That recording was of a song thrush I encountered many times near a beach. With the long Summer I also encountered them singing quite late, here’s one I encountered singing after sunset at around 10:00 pm:
https://xeno-canto.org/admin.php/1141488
Also in the evening, I encountered a blackbird and a song thrush singing together, it was absolutely magical:
https://xeno-canto.org/admin.php/1143376
And as always, it’s important not to misinterpret what is happening. The blackbird and song thrush were probably “shouting” at each other to stay away from each other’s territory. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a quite beautiful sound.
One of my favourite singers is the sedge warbler. I wrote about one I encountered regularly here:
Because they’re not around in Winter, and possibly not in August, this was my first time ever hearing sedge warblers singing by the ocean. Here’s a recording I got:
https://xeno-canto.org/admin.php/1147035
Courtmacsherry and the surrounding area has a lot of trees and vegetation right next to the sea, so there are plenty of opportunities to hear garden or forest birds accompanied by the gentle sound of ocean waves.
It was a quite productive week for getting sightings of birds I had never seen before. In a field as I was walking towards the ocean, I saw my first pheasant:
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve seen a pheasant in captivity at some point, but this is my first sighting of a wild pheasant, so it went on my birding list!
For quite some time I’ve been hoping to see some more ocean birds. Even before I was a birder, I always imagined there was something quite epic in the life of a seabird. What kind of adventures were they encountering out there in the wild ocean? So I was delighted to get my first sighting of a razorbill:
I also got a photo that I didn’t even have time to look at until I got back to the city, the paradox of bird photography is that the more into bird photography you are, the less time you have to actually look at the pictures you’ve taken! Despite this cognitive overload of photos, there was a photo I mentally filed away in my head under, “Examine this photo more closely”. I had gotten a photo of what may well have been a bird I had never seen before. So when I got back to the city, I took a closer look at the photo, and asked some people who know more about birds than me, and established that it was my first ever sighting of a black legged-kittiwake!:
Seeing these two amazing seabirds made me think of sitting on Woodpoint, many years before I got into birding, and just seeing a seabird flying off in the distance, and having no idea what bird I was seeing, but being in awe of a creature that spent their lives on the sea and the air. And now I’ve reached the point where I’ve seen my first razorbill and first black legged- kittiwake. I sometimes wonder was I always a birder, and it just needed certain events that happened in 2024 to unlock that part of myself.
My week in Courtmacsherry also gave me some memorable encounters with a bird I’ve never actually seen, only heard. A whitethroat. The whitethroat, along with the starling and the sedge warbler, are probably the three most celebrated birds for mimicry I’ve encountered. I’ve spent many months listening intently to starlings, hearing their mimickry other birds, human vocalizations, and human machinery. Sedge Warblers I don’t get to hear as much because they only visit in the Summer, but I have heard them many times imitating a blue tit.
To say I’ve barely scratched the surface of what whitethroats are capable of in terms of their vocalizations would be a massive understatement. I only have eight recordings of them so far, in comparison to my more than forty sedge warbler recordings and more than one hundred and fifty starling recordings, so my journey of getting to know the amazing singing of a whitethroat has barely begun. But I did get my first recording where I was able to identify mimicry. Here’s a whitethroat imitating a sandwich tern:
https://xeno-canto.org/admin.php/1142074
Sandwich tern mimicry is tricky. Blackbird mimicry is much easier, because a blackbird tends to sing their usual song, then transition to mimicking an alarm or a siren, and then transition back to their usual song again. But there is so much mimicry packed into a whitethroat song, it becomes damn near impossible to identify where the whitethroat’s own song ends and the mimicry begins, or do they even have their own song, or is it the case that the mimicry collage is their own song? The whitethroat is a fascinating bird, and I’ll be delighted if I encounter more and more of them over the coming years.
Out on Woodpoint I encountered many happy sea birds, because the fishing was good! I was lucky that they were somewhat near land so that I was able to get some fairly clear photos.
Watching the birds on the ocean fishing was so joyful. Their life isn’t easy, with human overfishing threatening their very existence, causing many herring gulls to arrive in our cities as refugees, but for now, at least for today, they are still holding on, still fighting for their right to exist in a human dominated world.
A big surprise was seeing a great northern diver. I’ve seen them in Winter, but I haven’t seen them in August, so I assumed June was even less likely, but what did I see but a male great northern diver in Summer plumage, accompanied by a female. It just goes to show that after two years of birding, I still have a lot to learn. Even basic facts like when is the best time to encounter great northern divers still eludes me.
So, that’s the end of this blogpost, but it’s not the end of my tales of a wonderful June week spend in and around Courtmacsherry. Three birds I encountered on my travels have not been mentioned in this post, and that’s because I’ve decided those birds each deserve their own separate blogpost. And those will be written over the next few weeks, or possibly few months, depending on how busy I am. Until then, I hope this story of birding on the coast in the Summer has been entertaining and informative.
Ponderings Of An Autist 