Birds Ireland > Features

Book Review
by Niall Hatch, BirdWatch Ireland

New bird finding guide for Ireland
Finding Birds in Ireland: The Complete Guide
By Eric Dempsey & Michael O’Clery
Gill & Macmillan, Dublin (2007)
ISBN 978-0-7171-3916-3
Paperback, 366 pages, €20.00

This review appeared in BirdWatch Ireland's quarterly magazine, Wings, in November 2007. See BirdWatch Ireland for subscription details.

Finding Birds in Ireland: The Complete Guide is brought to us by the team responsible for the acclaimed Complete Guide to Ireland’s Birds and Pocket Guide to the Common Birds of Ireland. It is the first dedicated Irish bird-finding guide to be published since 1994’s groundbreaking, but now outdated, Where to Watch Birds in Ireland by the late Clive Hutchinson, and as such fills a long-standing gap in the market.

Organised county-by-county, it presents detailed information on over 400 of the best birdwatching sites in Ireland, including full colour maps, grid references, well-researched directions and expert tips on what birds to expect and where they should be looked for. Particularly welcome are the in-depth treatments of legendary birding hotspots such as Tacumshin Lake and Rogerstown Estuary, which have until now been very difficult for beginners and birders without local knowledge to access. In a marked departure from earlier books of this kind, the focus is not unduly weighted towards coastal areas, and both the quantity and geographic spread of the locations covered is most impressive.

A real innovation is the inclusion of a coloured bar chart for each of the most important sites showing the best times of the year to visit: a simple and easy to understand feature that I am surprised has not been widely used in other bird-finding guides.

One of the main challenges in writing a guide such as this must be to decide which audience to pitch it at. Is it mainly to be for experienced Irish birders looking to find new places to search for rarities? Is it for novices looking to discover birds outside their gardens for the first time? Is it for foreign birding tourists, for whom seeing their life Blue Tit may be just as important as getting to grips with a Fea’s Petrel on a remote western headland? The authors have pulled off the difficult task of catering to all these groups without leaving any feeling short-changed. The maps and directions presume no prior knowledge of the local terrain, the lists of notable species for the sites are broken down by season, with a separate list of rarities for each, and the sites and birds are fully indexed, making them easy to find in the text.

Of particular use to readers new to birding in Ireland is the dedicated chapter on the island’s 60 most common species, complete with detailed range maps, habitat descriptions and information on seasonal abundance. As the authors state, “These are the species which a beginner would be largely familiar with, and which any visitor to the country, seeing Ireland’s birds for the first time, would certainly see within a few days of his or her trip.” This should enable foreign visitors to work out in advance what they can expect from their trip and which species deserve their main focus, though I would quibble with a couple of the choices made for this section, e.g., the omission of Dunlin, Treecreeper and Long-tailed Tit and the inclusion of Raven. Also bound to go down well with tourists is the inclusion of an introduction giving information on car hire, currency, driving in Ireland, the telephone system, etc.

One of my favourite features is the inclusion of a complete Irish language list of the birds of Ireland, a simple touch but one that sets this book apart from any other publication currently on the market. A checklist for recording “ticks” is also included, as well as a very useful appendix dealing with seawatching, an activity that has grown enormously here in recent years and for which Ireland has become recognised as one of Europe’s premier destinations.

Throughout the book, the birding expertise of the authors shines through, and it is clear that they really know what they are talking about. I tested it on a recent birding trip to Mizen Head in Co. Cork, a place where I have managed to get myself badly lost on many previous occasions. Not only were the map and directions spot on, making navigation very easy, but the information on where exactly to look for migrants and vagrants was unerringly accurate, and at times even almost eerily prescient: for example, the precise spot the authors mention in the Lissagriffin Lake area as being “good for pipits and wheatears” was where I was treated to fine views of Ireland’s first Buff-bellied Pipit since 1967, found there the week before amongst perhaps the largest flock of Rock Pipits I have ever seen, as well as a stunning Greenland Wheatear.

This book is also undeniably gorgeous, not something one could say of many bird-finding guides on the market. The text and maps are supplemented throughout by Michael O’Clery’s fine artwork: his wader portraits in particular are stunning. A very few typographical errors have survived the proof-reading process, but none I have found that are in any way significant. Having been fortunate enough to have used bird-finding guides to many regions of the world, I have to say that this is certainly the most attractively designed one I have ever come across.

This is perhaps the most thoroughly researched and user-friendly bird-finding guide I have read, and it sets a new benchmark for all future publications for any region of the globe. For so long poorly catered for in comparison with other countries, Ireland can now boast one of the finest birdwatching guides around. It is a remarkable achievement by the authors, and is an essential purchase for every birder living in or even thinking of visiting Ireland.

Niall Hatch
BirdWatch Ireland

You can buy this book direct from the BirdWatch Ireland website here.