I Miss Seawatching

Days like today, I miss seawatching. Everything about the weather reminded me of squally days on Galley or the Bridges of Ross, the temperature and moisture of the air, the scent of it, the feel of the humidity on my skin.

I don't count the Baltic as a sea. It's not particularly salty. It has no tides. It barely has any wave action. That's a lake. A big lake. But a lake nonetheless.

This popped up on my social media reminders today, and I was suddenly hit with memories of sea breezes, crashing waves and the sound of seabirds.

Madeiran Petrel - by Robert Vaughan

On the 18th of July, 2010 I saw this beauty from Galley Head, co. Cork. It's as clear as memory to me now as it was 7 years ago. 

Watching scores of petrels flutter past on an incredible misty morning that everyone else (bar Rónán McLoughlin) had written off as not worth the effort. One birder had even driven to the head, looked out to sea, and decided to go home to bed. Oh the humanity.

Can you imagine how sick you would feel? 

It was a day I won't forget any time soon. Read about it here 

I'm also delving into nostalgia due to conversations online regarding a Swinhoe's Petrel in the Canary islands, a species I saw many years ago on one of my most enjoyable weeks of seawatching ever, in the Dhofar region of Oman. 


Swinhoe's Petrel - Robert Vaughan

A week spent sleeping in a car in the desert, living mostly off drypacked food, seawatching mornings and evenings, and birding wadis and parks during the day.

The sea there, during the monsoon, was the most energetic and bird filled sea I have ever seen, and ice cold whenever I would get in to cool off, a current straight up from the Antarctic.

I've traded that, for a world of forests, like an adorably handsome Ewok, wandering forest trails looking for woodpeckers and warblers. 


And of course there are my beloved raptors. I don't feel short changed by this trade, but those days persist, where the rain that falls here retains it's taste of the Atlantic and it's memory of an older home.

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