When the birds still sing 

I grew up to the sound of seabirds in Rusheen Bay – now their voices are fading

Dr Pat Harrold

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night”

Paul McCartney

Is there anything as hopeful as the first sound of birdsong before dawn? It signals the end of the long, cold night. For those in pain, a new day offers the possibility of change.

Now, in the darkest of times for the planet, birds still sing at dawn – although every year there are fewer.

I am delighted that I got Seán Ronayne’s recent book for Christmas: Nature Boy: A Journey of Birdsong and Belonging. You will have seen it in bookshops, with its cover image of a young man who looks like a rockstar against a sky full of swarming starlings. You may also have seen the brilliant documentary about his mission to record the 200 Irish bird species.

Sadly, about half those species are amber- or red-listed, which means they are headed for extinction.

Ronayne is an expert, and a reminder that being out with someone attuned to birdsong is a real treat. Everyone should experience a dawn chorus walk at least once, when the great well of sound from trees and bushes is unravelled by someone with the knowledge to discern the distinct voices within.

That gibbon-like yammering? It’s the little grebe. The solemn ‘cronk’ belongs to the raven. That loud peal of trills? Improbably, it comes from the tiny wren. And someone like Seán Ronayne will make sense of it all.

If you can’t get to a Birdwatch Ireland event, you could get the Merlin app. It was developed by a team at Cornell University and it’s completely free. Just find a spot where birds are singing and switch it on. Like magic, it identifies the birds, shows you their pictures, and gives you all the information you need to get acquainted. That faint piping in your garden – the sound you barely noticed – is revealed to be the calls of goldcrests, long-tailed tits, dunnocks, and goldfinches, none of whom you have actually seen.

When I was small, I could hear the birds in Rusheen Bay, three fields away – a great boiling cacophony of seabirds trilling, screeching, calling, and hooting. It was a startling wall of sound that often kept me awake at night. Today, although the Rusheen Estuary is a designated bird reserve just outside Galway, there are nowhere near as many birds, and the wild, bubbling cry of the curlew has become a rarity. The lapwing is all but gone; the ring ouzel, like a blackbird with a priest’s collar sitting on every stone wall, is extinct. You could have stood on a headland, looking at Galway City, while half a dozen corncrakes sawed away in the long grass. They are now banished to remote places, away from our destruction.

Now, in the darkest of times for the planet, birds still sing at dawn – although every year there are fewer

Those who still get to hear them are indeed privileged.

It is known as Shifting Baseline Syndrome. The generations alive now do not remember what a richness of biodiversity we had before us, and the birdsong I listened to was a pale imitation of what my grandfather heard. Our generation walk through a wood at dusk, hear the birds singing, and think this is as good as it gets. We don’t hear the voices of the species who are lost forever.

Human nature has many good points, but we have a lamentable tendency to see the natural world in terms of what is useful to us. “What use are birds?” a man asked me once when he saw me out with my binoculars.

“What use are you?” I asked him. He didn’t appreciate it.

There is some good news. There were hardly any raptors (falcons and hawks) to be seen in Ireland for decades. Then they stopped poisoning them and now every town has buzzards, kestrels, and sparrowhawks. We even have white-tailed eagles on our lakes. We are rewilding bogs, and cranes and other long-extinct birds are returning.

Is it enough? No.

Is it too late? Maybe.

Is there hope? Always.