North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Corncrake

The light of a million sunrises has washed over these stones since they were erected around 3200 years ago. These two stones are the 'gateway' stones marking the entrance of the circle - they face due south and sit on a boggy hill surrounded by lakes and hills of pine forest and bog - a view not unlike the view that would have greeted the builders of the circle.

I remember a particularly sunny summer many years ago, when I was seven or eight. I would walk the mile or so to the national school every day, under the watchful eye of my older neighbour (who was probably only eleven or twelve at the time). I’m sure it rained on us many times, but in my John Hinde, Technicolor-tinged memories, the walk home each day was under a blazing sun, strolling past undulating swirls of meadow and listening to the rattle and rustle of ripening cornfields.

When you are a small child wandering about in the countryside, it’s amazing how much stuff you see, and catch. We thought nothing of running into the kitchen at home with a mouse or a baby rabbit cupped in our hands and wonder why our mother didn’t quite share our enthusiasm. On the walk home that summer, we watched, day after day, a family of foxes playing in the meadow, the vixen watching her brood of five or six cubs playing nearby. Alas, our area probably had as many guns as Kentucky – every farmer had at least one shotgun and two of my neighbours were members of the Irish Clay-Pigeon shooting team. The foxes didn’t see winter.

As summer ripened into Autumn, pheasants were a common sight. But there was another sight that was far less common but no less rewarding. One evening, we heard a crek-crek-crek sound in a cornfield and saw the dull shadow of a bird scurrying through the corn. It was a corncrake (in Latin, it goes by its onomatopoeic name crex crex), and it was the first and last time I heard or saw it at home. Many years later, I heard the same call again. I was in Athlone, with the local Birdwatch Ireland group. After a few pre-birding drinks in Sean’s Bar by the river, we wandered out to a field south of the lock gates that separates Lough Ree from the Shannon Callows. It was eleven o’clock on a beautiful clear, balmy August night. One of the group had a couple of bones with notches cut into them; by rubbing them together, it made the same noise as a lovelorn corncrake. And sure enough, after a couple of rattles of the bones, a corncrake croaked back in the darkness.

The Shannon Callows is Ireland’s Everglades – thousands of acres of land floods as the Shannon overflows from Athlone to Portumna every winter. In pre-silage days, this annual flood forced farmers to cut their hay late, in August. It is also one of the main habitats for the corncrake, which has become damn near extinct around the country. Though the bird can find its way from Africa to Ireland every year, all too often, it cannot find its way to safety from a meadow to a hedge. A corncrake won’t cross open ground, and the custom of cutting meadow from the edge inwards doomed many a bird. In the Callows, the farmers get a small grant to cut their hay late, and to cut the grass from the centre outwards, giving birds a chance to escape. Smaller groups of birds can be found across Galway and Mayo and on the Aran Islands.

I was driving out to a stone circle last weekend when something in a field caught my eye. I had driven on about a quarter of a mile before I finally decided to turn back for a second look. It was a field that had been cut for hay about a month previously. It was covered with a rich coat of aftergrass and there were clumps of hay scattered about the field, left over from where the baler had dropped them. I parked the car in the gateway so that the passenger door was closest to the gate. Through my binoculars, I stared at one particular ‘clump’. As I suspected, it was a bird. But it wasn’t a pheasant or grouse. Though it was sitting low in the grass, it looked like a corncrake. I sneaked out of the car, hiding behind the pier of the gate. The bird was clearly suspicious and hid down in the grass for about fifteen minutes. But then it stood up and began feeding. I was close enough that its image filled the view through binoculars and it looked like a juvenile, probably this year’s brood. Alas, as I reached for my camera, it made a run for it – I took a few shots as it high-tailed towards the hedgerow. I was shooting on film so I’ll have to wait awhile to see if they came out OK. But even if they don’t , I was happy. I might never get as good a view again, and I’m probably one of the few people in the country who will ever get to see them that close, so that would have to count as a good day.

When I got to the stone circle, I spent some time taking photographs of the area, which is a raised bog. While composing one photo, I was conscious of something swooping very close to my head. I presumed it was a cheeky crow and wasn’t going to even look up. But I did – it was a hen harrier. I never saw one of these until I came back to Ireland four years ago, and now there are a couple of places that I know that I have a better than average chance of seeing one. This area has a number of pairs.

The day didn’t end so well. Despite my Francis of Asissi moments during the day, I managed to inadvertently delete all the photographs I took that day due to an over-enthusiastic virus checker, which ‘restored’ all my photographs into meaningless gobbledegook when I booted up ( I had left the CF card in a drive at boot up and the software took this as a personal affront).Ah well, you win some, you lose some.

Posted by Monasette at August 12, 2004 12:02 AM