I had the privilege of spending a few days in north west Donegal last week, enjoying some fine weather, swims in its pristine Atlantic waters, and short encounters with some of the area’s birdlife.
During my stay in Dunfanaghy, under the constant presence of Errigal and Muckish, and never far from its rugged coastline, I explored some of the region’s striking environments, Sheephaven Bay, the magnificent Horn Head, Ballyness Bay and Bloody Foreland, or Cnoc Fola, ‘Hill of Blood’.
Traversing the coastline offered repeated views of a resilient Tory Island, the angular, jagged rocks of Tor mór standing tall with its residents against the ocean waves.
My meetings with birds included swimming with terns, the great migrants of our globe, as their slim bodies dived continuously for small fish, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. A ringed plover appeared on a sandy shore, the small wader with grey-brown upper parts, white throat and short orange legs, making short runs punctuated with pauses to pick up food.
Above the dunes close by, a buzzard called out trying to evade a mobbing gull, perturbed, as many birds are near a hooked beak and sharp claw.
Later, in Dungloe, I learned that its official name, An Clochán Liath, meaning the ‘grey stepping stone’, came from the presence of a grey granite slab on the riverbed at the bottom of the town, which was the only crossing point until a proper bridge was built in 1782.
There, while walking by the town’s pier at low tide, I encountered the ‘saintly’ oystercatcher, a chunky wader of rocky shores and large inland lakes. A single bird worked its way through the large clumps of seaweed on rocks and soft sand, probing both for invertebrates, mussels, or limpets.
Its long orange-red stabbing bill stood out, as did its black head, back, and white underparts, against surrounding shades of earthly brown. Standing to observe, I couldn’t help but think of the bird’s links to Saint Brigid and one of its Irish names Giolla Bríd, ‘servant of Brigid’, pointing to the famous legend of how the bird helped the saint in a time of great distress.
When trying to escape her chasing enemies, she fell along the shore, where patrolling oystercatchers came to her rescue and covered her with seaweed, hiding and saving Brigid from the attackers. To thank them, she blessed the birds, giving them a faint sign of a cross on the breast. Today in images, Brigid is often depicted holding oystercatchers in her hands.
An alternative version of the tale found in Yvonne Aburrow’s Auguries and Omens: The Magical Lore of Birds (1994), says it was Christ himself who was covered with seaweed by oystercatchers near the Sea of Galilee, and he who gave the birds the cross on their chests.
A bird with an evocative, shrill ‘beep, beep’ or piping call, it is often heard first before seeing its striking plumage. Oystercatchers are also revered in Scottish lore with their calls described in Scot’s Gaelic as bí glic, bí glic, meaning ‘be wise, be wise’, taken as a warning of an approaching storm by fishermen and mariners out at sea.
An alternative version of the St Brigid tale says it was Christ himself who was covered with seaweed by oystercatchers near the Sea of Galilee, and he who gave the birds the cross on their chests
Originally called Sea-pie, the bird was renamed as Oystercatcher in 1731 after being observed eating oysters, the name formally adopted in the following years. A resident all around our coasts, numbers are swelled during the winter by visiting birds from Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
Just before leaving the pier, I watched a small group of three more oystercatchers arrive to join the lone bird, their haunting calls ringing out across the bay.
