Earlier this month in west Cork, a bee-eater, Merops apiaster, from the Mediterranean flew in from the sea and took up residence in a garden overlooking Dursey Sound. It stayed around for days, a thrush-sized bird as vivid as a kingfisher with a long, curved bill for catching insects in flight.
As word spread on the electronic grapevine, a succession of twitchers arrived at the garden. They scarcely needed binoculars, for the bird would sometimes stay perched within a couple of metres. In its sorties after insects (bees, presumably among them), it shone out brilliantly against the green fields and the deep blue water of the Sound.
The bee-eater is very rare in Ireland: this is the 23rd bird in the past half-century, worth a place on anybody's life-list. I've never seen one, but I knew it in my mind's eye: yellow throat, blue belly, reddish back, gaudy as a child's painting - one of the few birds the field-guides call "unmistakable".
Its image has been with me for more than 30 years, reinforced each time I've flicked past Plate 46 in A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, by Roger Peterson, Guy Mountfort and P.A.D. Hollom, first published by Collins in 1954. The spine of my 1966 edition is frayed and coming adrift at last, and a lot of the pages are stained at the edges and buckled from rain. All over these islands, ageing birdwatchers like myself took their first instruction from this book to sort the chiffchaff from the willow warbler, the linnet from the twite.
But the guide may now, with honour, be retired to the top shelf: its "lifetime" successor is here. Moreover, an Irish artist has spent the past 15 years or so in painting scores of its most beautiful plates. The new Collins Bird Guide (£25 in UK) confirms Killian Mullarney as one of the most subtle and accomplished bird artists in Europe.
A guide so ambitious and complex - 722 species, 3,500 paintings - had to be a team effort and this one seems to have been unusually heroic, surviving two untimely deaths. Mullarney was joined in the paintings by Dan Zetterstrom and the book is written by Lars Svensson and translated from the Swedish. A Swedish co-publisher also rescued the project when Collins withdrew from financing a time-consuming struggle for perfection.
To set this book against its earlier (and considerably lighter) prototype is to see just how exacting, even obsessive, the hobby of birdwatching has become, and how important it is for so many people to play the ornithologist in just this one aspect: the identification of species in the field. It was Roger Peterson who devised the original method of illustrating birds using pointers to distinguishing features - colour of legs, length of bill, and so on. He could never have imagined today's amateur army of twitchers, many with costly telescopes, who are prepared, even eager, to master intricate plumage differences between gulls at various ages, or to sort out anonymous warblers as they flit through the green "aquarium light" deep among leaves.
The great number of paintings in the new guide was dictated, first of all, by its generous geographical range: the "Europe" of the title includes North Africa, much of the Middle East and even the Canary Islands and Madeira. Thus there are 20 sorts of lark, for example, and 27 different gulls, as well as the more obvious exotics such as the Arabian bustard and babbler, or half a dozen falcons one would have to journey to see. But even the "Irish" list of birds seems to grow year by year, as more people spend more time twitching after rarities at the islands, headlands and coastal lagoons where unlikely birds drop in on passage. At the last count, the Irish total had reached 424 species - including, as it happens, nearly all those 27 gulls - and there were three people who'd actually seen more than 350 of them, which had to take a lot of hard driving.
Beyond the sheer number of species, the abundance of the new book's paintings are meant to serve its simple purpose: to tell one bird from another. Thus - a page at random - Killian Mullarney does eight paintings of the Arctic tern, including two to show the subtle plumage differences between a "fresh" and a "faded" juvenile. At 41, he is now a considerable field ornithologist and a familiar figure at international seminars on bird identification. But many will also place him as one of a famous big Dublin family with unusual ideas on education. Maire Mullarney, mother of 11, believed in early teaching at home and responding to the natural curiosity of children.
She read that Japanese children were given paint brushes at an early age and encouraged to splash out for themselves. Killian's first pictures were painted on the white tiles of the kitchen wall, site of a busy and fluid family mural. A fascination with birds arrived in these early, eager years and never left him. He found the classic illustrations of Charles Tunnicliffe, then the modern bird paintings of Robert Gillmor, Eric Ennion and John Busby, and the splendid Swedish artist, Lars Jonsson.
Jonsson, in particular, paints birds that not only live on the page, but are accurate, too: a balance that comes from endless sketching in the field. Mullarney now lives in a cottage beside the Wexford slobs, where wintering flocks of wildfowl and waders virtually parade before his telescope as he captures rapid detail with a fistful of coloured pencils.
To work on the new guide, he quit his full-time job in a Dublin art and design studio in the early 1980s to start travelling in pursuit of birds he had never seen. That was before the immensity of the task struck home to everybody, and Dan Zetterstrom was given his six-year share of the work. Their paintings sit beautifully together, but one can't help regretting that it's Zetterstrom's corncrake, not Mullarney's.
BINS, the twitchers' telephone newsline, is at 15-50-111-700. To join the Irish Bird Network on E-mail, send the message SUBSCRIBE IBN-L (and nothing else) to listserv@listserv.hea.ie.
