It is an unforgettable image: a large flock of barnacle geese in flight over the north Co Mayo island of Inishkea. More than half a century has passed since this austere island, situated off the Mullet Peninsula and subjected to the harshest of Atlantic storms, was last inhabited. But for these geese and other birds, as well as the grey seal, it is sanctuary. Barnacle geese winter here, departing each April for their breeding grounds in Greenland. In preparation for the long journey, the distinctive black-and-white barnacles graze with more than a hint of desperation.
Since 1961 environmentalist David Cabot, then a zoology student at Trinity College in Dublin, has made his way to the island every year, ringing the geese for identification. The trip has its hazards; in 1983 foul weather left Cabot, then involved in a Seanad campaign, stranded for a week.
Hardship has never bothered him. He sees it as useful. "People tend to be flabby and weak. I've always pushed myself. It works for me. I don't want to slide into death, becoming helpless. I've always been active. If I began to fail, I don't know. I think I'd do a Hemingway - well, I wouldn't . . . but . . ." Less than 12 hours after this interview was completed, Cabot, whose new book, Ireland, A Natural History, is already sold out, was on his way back by road to Slovenia, where he has worked for the past four years, advising the administration on environmental issues in preparation for that country's entry into the European Union. "I'm going to camp in the Alps," he says with the air of a smug schoolboy enjoying the envy he inspires.
Categorising Cabot, the wide-ranging natural scientist and writer, has never been easy and is becoming increasingly difficult. "I'm a film-maker - when I was 13 I announced I wanted to be a photographic ornithologist." He is also an academic, having lectured in zoology at University College Galway, where he completed his doctorate. He later served as an environmental consultant under two taoisigh and spent 20 years at An Foras Forbartha. Founder of the Irish Wildfowl Conservancy, he had two careers with the BBC, initially as a film editor during which he worked at the BBC wildlife unit in Bristol and, some years later, in London as a radio broadcaster and presenter. Then he became a public servant and governmental adviser.
There have also been three expeditions to Greenland, including the one in 1987 which located the breeding grounds of the barnacle geese. He has produced a large body of scientific reports such as the Green 2000 Advisory Group findings in 1993. He founded Wildgoose Films, which has to date made 11 films. Mention the BBC wildlife films and he sighs: "They have so much money." Cabot has also written the useful and practical Collins Guide to Irish Birds (1995), in which he focuses on the 143 birds most likely to come within the vision of the non-specialist birdwatcher.
Always going here and there, always involved in several projects at once, it is easy to overlook the fact that Cabot's enthusiasm and energy are well supported by his methodical personality. "I'm unconventional," he says and adds, "I'm wilful, very determined and ruthless. I drive myself and others when I want to do something." Though said more as fact than warning, it is obvious that Cabot is used to fulfilling his plans and does not tolerate incompetence on any level. He seems to act on the belief "you only live once".
A couple of weeks short of 61, Cabot is dressed in blue jeans, a fleece jacket and newish Nike trainers. His voice is vaguely conspiratorial with a faint, underlying West Country burr. Under his thatch of white hair, he wears a surprised expression. His entire aura is one of energy, curiosity, good-natured impatience, restlessness - although while filming he will wait in the rain for two weeks or longer for the right shot. He would probably like to give the impression of being slightly zany, but Cabot is deliberate and astute far beyond the Jimmy Carter smile and youthful demeanour.
While not a political party man, he admits his natural sense of justice has been outraged by the undignified circus surrounding Charles Haughey. "I don't think anyone's private life should be treated in such a way. Whatever he has done, he was a visionary in many ways and did more for Irish wildlife and the environment than any Irish senior politician." It was Haughey who in 1991 declared Europe's first whale and dolphin sanctuary within the exclusive Irish fishery limits extending some 320 km from the Irish coast.
Slovenia has proved a wonderful experience for Cabot. Having advised the Irish government, he has found himself continuing in a similar role in a totally different culture. "It is a beautiful country. It's also Europe's best-kept secret. I almost don't want to talk about it, in case it becomes spoilt." In the extreme north of the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia is bordered by Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia. Cabot enjoys referring to its tiny 36 km coastline: should all Slovenia's two million inhabitants decide to stand along it at once, "they would each have to stand on only one foot". The Slovenians refuse to see themselves as part of the Balkans. For Cabot, the current war is limited to hearing the NATO bombers pass overhead.
When asked why he left the BBC, Cabot responds bluntly: "I didn't like London." While there lurks a hint of privilege about him, his work rate is impressive. Ireland is a monumental, near-definitive natural history of this country, and the 84th volume in the internationally respected New Naturalist series. It was completed in two years - a remarkable performance for an academic work of more than 500 pages.
Much of the research was carried out long into the night; sections were written on long journeys. This is a valuable, scientifically-based, professionally-indexed and accessible study. It is stronger on wildlife and botany than Frank Mitchell's classic Reading the Irish Landscape, while Cabot has less geology, archaeology and social history. He is a concerned environmentalist, but his book is not a campaigning tract. "I see it as a descriptive analysis; it's balanced and fair and factual."
He does not romanticise Ireland and the writing is largely unadorned. "I kept the literary and personal stuff to the foreword," he says. The narrative is based on the configuration of the Irish landscape and draws its structure from the main habitat types.
Tracing the historical dimension of Irish natural history writing back to a 7th century monk called Augustin (whom Robert Lloyd Praeger had always acknowledged as the first Irish natural history writer), he has relocated many overlooked and even forgotten pioneers. In the 18th and 19th centuries, and well into the present, Irish natural history writing was largely a Protestant tradition.
"It was dominated by the gentlemen in the big houses who had time and money - but this changed," says Cabot. In his book he describes as "one of the greatest tragedies of Irish natural history" the untimely death at 47 of William Thompson (1805-52), who only lived to write the first three volumes, all on birds, of his proposed study The Natural History of Ireland, leaving the rest unfinished.
In conversation, Cabot often refers to Praeger and Frank Mitchell as "my gods". Of Mitchell's daringly original pamphlet, Where Has Ireland Come From? (1994), an exciting narrative in which a group of naturalists board a magic carpet and defy time to embark on a 1,700-million-year geological tour of Ireland, Cabot remarks: "Isn't that just amazing? Who else could have possibly thought up such an idea?" He is delighted to feature in Mitchell's The Way That I Fol- lowed (1990) in which Mitchell describes a visit to Inishkea in 1978 with "David Cabot, of Greenland goose fame" and an official from An Foras Forbartha. The purpose of Mitchell's visit on Cabot's invitation was to examine a peat deposit. They set out in a rubber boat "in a strong wind with poor visibility . . . it then emerged that the intrepid David had never navigated a boat to the island before . . . there were only two lifejackets." Mitchell went without.
While a student at Trinity, Cabot had an important mentor in Prof David Webb (1912-95), whom he regards as the doyen of modern Irish botanists. Webb's An Irish Flora (1943) remains a seminal text, and as his former student remarks, that "small and innocuous-looking volume" is full of "plant identification as well as notes on habitats and distribution of all Irish species". Another major influence on the young Cabot was Prof Bill Watts, the man who introduced him to the surest method of revealing "the secrets of 10,000 years of vegetational history contained in bogs and fens".
Cabot brings an outsider's insider's eye to Ireland and agrees it is always a useful perspective. Born in Boston in 1938, he says warily: "I'm an American . . . and like many Americans there are things I love about America, and things I don't." He is the second child of three. "I have a brother and a sister, with two years between us all. More or less as it is with my three sons." He says he was "wild, very wild" as a boy. "I think that's often true of middle children." The family moved to Devon in 1946.
Where did his interest in natural history come from? "I just fell naturally into it", and he mentions his mother taking them to visit the places made famous by Emerson and Thoreau, Concord and Walden Pond in Massachusetts. "I think natural history offers great succour for troubled people, not that I'm a troubled person." He refers to the "great creative force" of nature and is about to say something about God when the phone rings.
He has a strong sense of his family and speaks about various ancestors as if he knew them all quite well. Two waves of Cabots had come to the Americas from Jersey, the first about 1700, landing in Salem, while his maternal grandfather, William Boyd, was a pioneering educationalist. His grandson walks over to a book shelf and selects three volumes of his grandfather's work and mentions his interest in Rousseau. Cabot's father, born in New Zealand, was an All Black.
Cabot's study in his Co Dublin home is a comfortable library-like room, housing an impressive collection of natural history books. Antiquarian books is another interest. A pensive pair of mounted barn-owls peer down on the scene. There are other pictures, mainly of birds. Along the walls of the four-sided, gallery-like hall outside is a number of watercolours by the 18th-century ornithological artist Thomas Pennant.
Painted a soft crimson, it is a fine house, possessing a casual country atmosphere despite being part of a terrace in the exclusive but densely populated Dalkey. "I love my home. I can identify all the birds in the garden - that's a thrush singing - and see the brent-geese passing overhead on their way from Kilcoole." He moved here with his wife, Penny Gibbon, in 1969. But there had been several lives, or at least careers, before that.
Memories from his early American childhood are not forthcoming. "I was very young when we left." Of the 11 years spent at the famous Dartington Hall school, the first coeducational establishment in England, Cabot says sagely: "Oh, I was very wild." While there, his interest in roaming woods and fields, observing woodlarks and so on, intensified.
While he has developed an overview merging the natural sciences, ornithology has always been his first love. Why? "It's the mystery, the enigma, the distance. You can never get close to birds as you can with a dog or a cat. And, of course, for a scientist, there are the migrational patterns. But there's such beauty and poetry in the way they fly." He is also grateful for the way bird-watching drew him to the rest of nature, "the seals, the otters".
If intent on evoking his younger self as a wayward lad, Cabot nevertheless arrived in 1957 at University College Oxford - "where Bill Clinton went", he says with heavy irony, "but maybe you shouldn't mention that" - to study zoology. Near the end of the summer of his first year Cabot arrived in Ireland on the Rosslare ferry, bound for a two-day stay in Co Carlow. As he reports in his foreword: "Making my way northwards, the first arresting ornithological surprise was a hooded crow frisking some rubbish on a heap of refuse outside New Ross. They were a rarity where I had just come from" - widespread throughout Ireland, there are about 290,000 pairs in this country, and as well as frequenting refuse tips, they raid nests and snatch the young.
Serious character flaws aside, that bird retains a symbolic importance for him and an artist's impression of one graces the hardback edition of Ireland. The only hooded crows he had previously seen were further north, in Scotland. The discovery set him thinking.
One of his favourite stories features the motorist who gave him a lift towards Co Carlow. There was an "agglomeration of dirty nappies adrift on the back seat". Between the crow and the nappies, Cabot decided he would come to Ireland. Abandoning Oxford was not difficult: "I didn't like the place. It was full of upper-class types with polo ponies. Guys who had been hardened by public school - all the cold showers and the sex."
In 1959, after spending a year living at Dawlish Warren, on the Exe Estuary in Devon, studying waders, he arrived at Trinity to continue studying zoology and graduated with a first class honours degree. The waders left an impression on him. Some years later, when lecturing at University College Galway, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the Helminth Parasite in wader birds at Galway Bay.
After all this time and the extensive study he has done on Ireland's ecology, does he feel Irish? "Of course I do, in ways. I have an Irish passport. Look." He rummages in a bag. "I have this as well", and he shows his US one. "I have other passports," he says and you feel he could produce anything. "In Slovenia they see me as `the Irishman'." Ireland is his home, probably because it contains his favourite place, Co Mayo, and the remote cottage he has on a spit some miles beyond Louisburgh.
Did Cabot set out to challenge Mitchell's Reading The Irish Landscape? "No. It's a counterpart, a companion volume. I see it as - and I hope it is - a closing of the circle. I've added the biology, the flora and fauna." Looking at the book now, how does he feel about it? Cabot holds Ireland in his hands and says frankly: "I don't think I could do it all over again." What hopes has he for it? "I don't expect people to read it from cover to cover. But I'd like to think if someone wanted to know about some place, they will pick it up, check the index and read, say, the entry on the Burren." They will.
Ireland, A Natural History by David Cabot is published by HarperCollins, £17.99 in UK.
