On looking over, once more, Alannah Heather's book Errislannon - the name of a peninsula just across from Clifden and the famous and lovely Sky Road, and remembering days spent farther west on the famous Coral Strand (don't quibble about the precise meaning of "coral"), the thought of a bird comes to mind, one that hasn't been seen since those long-ago days. It is the chough. On the same arm of the land that bears the Sky Road there was, near sea level, a ruined coastguard station, and this was the home of a tribe of choughs - a black crow-like bird but with distinctive marks, i.e. bright red legs and beak. Also, in flight it is almost comically acrobatic, apparently for the fun of it. Its wing feathers spread wide, it tumbles and loops through the air.
The old building was knocked down or collapsed and the choughs have departed from the area, it is said. Some have it they are still to be found farther out on the peninsulas or on the nearby islands, for they also build their nests in caves. We have a lot of them in Ireland, compared with Britain; indeed, according to Ireland, a Natural History (Harper-Collins) by David Cabot, the bird occurs here in greater abundance than anywhere else along the European coastline. It likes areas of old-style farming ("low-intensity", writes Cabot, more precisely) and places where rough grassland, and machair still exist. Interesting little side-light on modern farming: cowpats from livestock that have been treated with chemicals against worms are sterile - i.e., they starve the little juicy creatures on which choughs depend. Now that this is understood, according to an article in The Daily Telegraph of a week or two ago, conservation bodies in Cornwall and Wales have successfully campaigned for restrictions on such worm treatments. So the cowpats will now be chough-friendly.
But choughs hunt for their food by visual clues, Cabot tells us, so their favourite ground is of short grass, especially land grazed by sheep. The bill of a chough is curved and sharp-pointed, a digging and probing tool. Anyway Co. Galway in 1992 had 20 to 38 pairs but Kerry and Cork by far the most, with Antrim nearly bereft. Back to the Errislannon area another day. Y