“By your right foot, Ella. On the road,” David shouted from his jeep. And with that, having wasted time searching the grass to the left of the gravel-laden track, I finally spotted it: in a hollow barely etched into the surface, one large speckled egg.
It was, to my eyes, an absurd and almost comical place to start a new life – smack in the middle of a road linking David Cabot’s home in the Mayo townland of Carrigskeewaun, Killadoon, to White Strand. David, one of Ireland’s most distinguished naturalists and the author of multiple books on Irish birds, smiled. The parents, a male and female ringed plover, were a few metres away, running up and down the road, stopping and starting with understandable alarm. Just ahead, a lapwing pair lifted, their synthesised call – reminiscent of a 1980s computer game – drawing my attention.
Far from being a ridiculous place to nest, the female plover’s decision to lay her disproportionately large egg in the road is ingenious. If laid on the grass, the creamy egg, speckled with flecks of grey, would have advertised itself as a juicy morsel to every passing fox, mink and crow. On the road, in a scrape so minimal it barely registers as a nest at all, its markings are precisely tuned to gravel and stone, and so it melts in, almost invisible.
Ringed plovers are “precocial” nesters; the chicks aren’t helpless when they hatch. Instead, they’re fully feathered and mobile, so there’s no need for a hidden, well-made nest to protect them. The hollow is called a scrape because that’s what the birds do with their feet – they scuff the ground and nestle their breasts into the space, rotating their bodies to form a small depression just deep enough to stop the eggs from rolling away.
The plover egg was on my mind all day. That evening, I opened Gordon D’Arcy’s newly published book, Birdstyle. There, almost as if D’Arcy had been kneeling beside me on that gravel road, was the ringed plover, precisely observed, with D’Arcy’s illustration capturing its striking black-and-white banded plumage around its face and chest.
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“The nest is a masterpiece of camouflage,” D’Arcy writes, “the four whitish, speckled eggs, pointed inwards and set in a mere scrape, usually bear a strong resemblance to surrounding gravel or beach pebbles.” He notes the bird’s preference for running before flying, and its astonishing broken-wing act, feigning catastrophe to draw predators away from the eggs, in what is one of nature’s great theatrical gestures.
D’Arcy has been watching and writing about birds for over 60 years. With Birdstyle, he’s produced something new. It’s not an identification guide, an ornithological manual, or a natural history, though it contains threads of all. What it is, instead, is a book in which science and art are brought to bear on 112 Irish birds, each bird getting a double-page spread.
On one side, a five-line verse to capture what D’Arcy calls the bird’s “intrinsic character or ‘jizz’” – that quality an experienced birder reads almost unconsciously from posture, plumage, movement, and presence. On the other side, an ink-and-wash vignette paired with a colour illustration in pencil and oil pastel on tinted paper, alongside the informative prose. The effect is like watching a naturalist and a painter look at the same bird from different angles, noticing different things.
“In juxtaposing natural science with imaginative art,” D’Arcy says, “this book seeks to break the mould”.
To compress a bird’s “jizz” into five lines that are scientifically accurate and poetic – two not obviously compatible demands – is ambitious. Too much of one, and you might quickly lose the other. Science wants to specify and stick to facts; poetry wants to leap and feed your imagination.
But with his experienced eye and deep knowledge, D’Arcy finds the balance. His ringed plover haiku-esque verse opens with “clever shorebird / protecting clutch / in shingle cup”. The peregrine falcon gets the full drama of its stoop: “The tilt, the drop, the blur / the white-hot hit / of the masked executioner.” His lapwing is a “flapwing / haughty strider / kitten-caller”. The oystercatcher, confronting a bivalve, is a “shellfish clamp / oyster’s trap”. The Great Spotted Woodpecker is a “tattoo percussionist / pied and poppy-red / woodlander / banished with the felling / welcome home returnee”. The mighty kingfisher is “blue volt-bolt / current-flash / heart-stopping thing / fly-by / of the river’s king”. The accuracy stands solidly behind the playfulness and joy.
D’Arcy has been birdwatching since he was a child, when classmates called him “Birdy” in a Belfast schoolyard. Six decades of watching, drawing, writing and sharing, but there’s no jadedness or coasting in these pages; D’Arcy is clearly besotted, and that energy reverberates off the page.
Back on David’s road in Killadoon, we motored on towards his house overlooking the beach. Because the egg was in the middle of the road, the wheels didn’t do any damage. In the rear-view mirror, I watched as the ringed plover pair immediately ran back to it.
Birdstyle by Gordon D’Arcy is published by Dingle Publishing Services.
