Every year I make two trips to the Nagle Mountains on the bike. A year just doesn’t feel complete without it. Despite the annoying presence of Coilte plantations on the mountains, and I’ve written about my feelings about those kind of plantations here:
fortunately, a lot of the mountain range is still a beautiful wilderness of heather, and my visits there mean I see a lot of different insects and birds. I went to the Nagle Mountains in August and September of this year, and I was delighted to get my first ever encounter with hen harriers!
The lighting almost makes it look like the bird’s right wing is missing! Fortunately, I did get pictures of hen harriers that are a bit clearer:
I’ve always found the Nagle Mountains to be great for seeing birds of prey. The only time I’ve ever seen a peregrine falcon in flight is on the Nagle Mountains, I have seen them many times before, but perched on a building in an urban area. Kestrels are a regular sight there, which is great because areas that are regular hangouts for kestrels seem to be getting rarer and rarer. My heart soars when I see a kestrel hovering in place over the mountains:
On my second trip to the Nagles, it was windy, and the thought did cross my mind that it might be a bad day to go, wind means less opportunities to record bird vocalizations. But a big advantage of the wind is, you get to see kestrels exploiting the wind in order to hover in place. It’s a really neat trick. If the wind is blowing at, we’ll say, twenty miles an hour, a kestrel will fly at twenty miles an hour in the opposite direction. It can look quite surreal to see the kestrel flapping quite hard and not getting anywhere, but that’s precisely what they intend. They want to stay frozen in place so they can survey the land below, perhaps a meal for themselves or their children awaits on the ground below.
This year not only did I experience my first encounter with hen harriers, but I also got my first sight of a hen harrier and a kestrel fighting! An unfortunately blurry photo, but at least I did manage to capture it!:
Gotta love birds! They’re always fighting!
This year I also got my first ever photo of a dragonfly in the mountains. I’ve seen dragonflies in the Nagles before, but never was I quick enough with the camera. Until now:
This summer common darters really lived up to their name. Basically, they were super common. Go anywhere in Cork City or the surrounding area, find anywhere even vaguely suitable for insect life, and you were pretty much guaranteed to see one of these type of dragonflies. What was wonderful was that there were common darters that were comfortable landing quite near me, so I feel I really got to know them this year. But also on the mountains, I saw a type of dragonfly, and a type of damselfly, that I’d never seen before!
It’s always quite a soothing experience to travel to these mountains. Yes, there’s Coilte Plantations, and yes, if you’re really unlucky, you’ll go there on a day when scramblers are creating enough noise to tear a hole in your skull, but, usually, you get to hear things you would otherwise forget the sound of, because the constant roar of engine noise makes us forget what the natural world sounds like. As much as I complain about how the wind can wreck my attempts to record birdsong, on the Nagle mountains you actually realize that the wind sounds quite beautiful. Because you can hear the wind near you, the wind a bit further away from you, and the wind a bit further away from you again, and so on and so forth, so you’re actually hearing this amazing 3-D landscape of sound. Sometimes walking through the mountains, I will hear a sudden sound in the distance. What was it. A raven? A buzzard? Sometimes I never find out, but there’s still a certain joy in being able to hear things that are far away, as opposed to it all being drowned out by road noise!
During the August trip I heard a lot of raven vocalizations. Here’s a raven I encountered:
https://xeno-canto.org/1173688
Listening to this recording again, I love how alive it is with the sounds of nature. The raven may be the lead vocalist, but doing some nice backing vocals are grasshoppers, bees,house martins (I think), and the sound of the wind. So nice to treated to such beautiful music on the mountains!
One of my holy grails of birding is to find a place where ravens always like to hang out, so I can observe their behaviour. I actually found that near Courtmacsherry, and I hope to write about that soon, but I don’t get out to Courtmacsherry as often as I’d like. I was hoping to find something similar in the Nagle Mountains. I often encounter ravens there, but is there a specific part of the mountain where they like to congregate? During the August trip, I tried to find out. Here’s some of the recordings I got as part of that expedition to a new part of the mountain range that I had never been to before:
https://xeno-canto.org/1165476
A short high pitch phrase! But that’s what I love about ravens, their vocalizations are so varied that often times you don’t even know what you’re going to get! Here’s another one:
https://xeno-canto.org/1164250
It looked like I had found a regular congregation point in the mountains for ravens. If that’s what I had found, I could just return to that exact point, on all future trips, and observe ravens!
Sadly, it wasn’t to be. When I returned in September, the ravens weren’t on that part of the mountains, though they were on other parts. Ravens certainly live in the Nagle mountains, but they just seem to, pop up randomly!
One of my other holy grails of birding (I have several holy grails) is to find a regular place where jays gather. Jays are wonderful birds that are orange and blue, and they screech very loudly and epicly! I sometimes encounter jays in the Nagle Mountains, but much like ravens, they seem to just, show up randomly. In September I heard a jay on the mountains, but in a different place from when I heard one the last time, and that was on a trip from several years ago. So looking for jays is often a cause for much frustration! But then again, when so, so many birds are under threat, jays have a green conservation status. Perhaps they have the right idea by staying away from us!
As I headed down the mountain to return home during the August trip, I was delighted to encounter absolutely loads of painted lady butterflies on the vegetation:
Painted ladies are amazing little insects. They migrate from Africa to Ireland! It’s common, and also extremely impressive, for birds to fly from one continent to another, but there is something about the tiny painted lady making that journey that is just so amazing. Some of the painted ladies were on the ground in front of me, and as I approached, they flew away. I needed to pass them in order to reach the base of the mountain, and I wished there was a way I could pass them without bothering them, but the path was too narrow. Were they actually feeling fear, or just instinctively moving away without feeling anything? I don’t think anyone knows for sure, but either way, it seemed a shamed to disturb these magnificent creatures.
That was one of the highlights of the August trip, it occurred on my way down the mountains to journey home, and funnily enough, the September trip was similar. As I neared the base of the mountain, I heard a sound in the distance. Was it a raven? Or maybe a dog? I would hopefully soon find out. I have difficulty telling where sounds are coming from, but I seemed to be able to, I hoped, tell where the sound was coming from in this instance. So I let my directionally confused ears guide me as best they could, and I encountered, this character!:
Seeing one of my favourite birds was an absolutely wonderful way to end the trip!
I cycled home at a quick pace, eager to avoid the rains that were due later. I feel such joy to know that, conifer plantations notwithstanding, such a wonderful haven for wildlife is located relatively near where I live.
Ponderings Of An Autist 