I was just finishing up in work yesterday afternoon and about to head home for a bout of gardening when the phone rang! It was Steve M. "Mick, there's a hoopoe down on Pollardstown Fen, some lads down there are on it..... if it hangs around another hour or so it'll be a cert......." "Okay Steve, gimme two minutes I'll call you back" Mmmnn, cut the grass, do some weeding blah blah blah or....... who was I kidding, the car was pointed towards Kildare and heading down the M7 before I even rang him back.
Hoopoe is a bird I was very keen to get. It was a big hole on my life list and a bird which I've attempted to get in the past but never had success. It's been recorded close enough to Ashbourne in the past but nearly always recorded as 'in a private garden, or, stayed for the day and left', this one had already been around for at least a day so it was with that tingling in the gut (you know the one) that I headed for the fen.
I picked Steve up on the way. The topic of conversation the whole way there was, it had better still be there.... this was a big one for both of us. Steve rang ahead when we were about 10 minutes from the fen, "eh no, we left about a half an hour ago" was the response to the question we both wanted answering..... "are you still on the bird?"
That tingling in the gut turned to near blind panic, what if we got there and there was no one else on the bird, would we be able to find it, was it even still around? We got to the car park at about 7.30pm and grabbed the gear and ran. Sure what was the panic, I always knew we'd get it (ahem). A local birder was still in situ and he brought us straight to the hoopoe.
I've spent hundreds of hours over the years browsing the Collins (paperback dog-eared first edition always in the car, hardback second edition on the bedside locker, and the pride of the lot the large format hardback second edition pride of place downstairs bookshelf) and the hoopoe really is a bird that looks like no other. It really is unmistakable. But I never imagined my first ever views would be so good, I'd have settled for a medium range 10 minutes or so, but we got the exact polar opposite.
We got within 10 metres of the bird as it just completely ignored us and fed on the soft ground of the fen. It was feeding on worms and insects as it moved slowly back and forth over a patch of ground right in front of our noses! Mike, the local birder even encouraged us to get closer, he had earlier, but we declined for fear of spooking the bird.
What followed was over an hour in the company of the hoopoe. Never once did it take one bit of notice of us, an experience I last had with a very tame snow bunting in Anagassan harbour a couple of years ago, the bunting allowing me within 3 or 4 feet! Eventually the hoppoe took flight to a nearby tree, opened its crest a few times and then disappeared out of view. I didn't mind too much at that stage as the light was beginning to fade and my stomach was beginning to rumble like a Massey Fergusson struggling to start on a cold morning.
Best of all (not for anyone else interested in seeing it), our sighting was the last recorded one as I write this post and that was 48hrs ago, so perhaps on this occasion I was lucky enough to be one of the few to get the view and not one of the many to have missed out.....
