Many of the islands in this series have had distinguished visitors. George Bernard Shaw used to spend part of the summer enjoying the gardens of Garinish Island, County Cork; Inishmaan, County Galway, is forever connected to JM Synge who used to live there; and German novelist Heinrich Boll sojourned on Hare Island on the River Shannon.
Were you to take a sea voyage in County Galway from Kinvara to Clarinbridge you would find the inconspicuous Fiddaun about half way along, lying north of Doorus Point. It is a neighbour of the stunningly beautiful Island Eddy which lies to its north about 1km away. At spring tides it is possible to walk to both islands from the narrow peninsula which extends into the sea from Killeenaran Pier.
Fiddaun Island can also boast a famous visitor, or at least a rare visitor, though the visitor in question is actually a bird: The Forster’s tern.
This beautiful sleek, white bird has been spotted many times in Ireland, though its visits are so infrequent that it can be classified as a vagrant here.
The bird is rare in Britain too and there was quite a kerfuffle when it was first spotted there in 1980. The Daily Mirror reported that: “300 bird-spotters, armed with £30,000 of telescopes and binoculars flocked to the cliffs of Falmouth to see it.” Its black head and red beak, red legs, together with a long forked tail should make it easily recognisable. However, this also describes another tern species, the common. It has a red bill with a black tip (common terns also have this feature). The differences amount to longer tail streamers and grey rump. The casual observer will not notice the difference.
Elsewhere in Ireland, the Forster’s tern has been observed at Mutton Island and Kinvara, County Galway, at Sandymount Strand in Dublin City, Tacumshin Lake in County Wexford, and also in County Louth.
There are many species of tern and they have a global distribution: Ireland’s population is represented by the common tern; little tern; sandwich tern; Arctic tern, and roseate tern. We have about 80% of the European population of the latter species and its thriving habitat on Rockabill Iland, off Dublin, is testament to a vigorous conservation policy by Birdwatch Ireland.
The principal habitat of the Forster’s tern is marshy ground and islands so it finds a perfect match at Fiddaun Island. Other islands fit the bill perfectly: Scattery Island in County Clare springs to mind, but there are possibly too many visitors there to see the church heritage sites. This very small island is whale-shaped — bulbous at one end and tapering to a point at the other. It is almost entirely grass-covered with a central depression where a marshy area is protected from the sea by a high bank.
The bird’s main habitat is in north America and it migrates across the vast continent though its breeding is confined to an area on the US/ Canada border, including Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
The Forster’s tern is named after the 18th-century German botanist Johann Reinhold Forster who observed the bird that would bear his name during fieldwork at Hudson Bay, Canada. Forster would go on to write ‘A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World’ in 1777 after his expedition with Captain James Cook in search of new lands. Of the cantankerous Cook (later stabbed to death in Hawaii), he wrote it ‘has always been the fate of science and philosophy to incur the contempt of ignorance’. Forster also had a species of ray named after him, the Forster’s hawkfish.
Apart from the abundant grasses which give shelter to the terns, Fiddaun Island has an abundance of seaweed. An auction once mentioned that Fiddaun’s crop was “widely known as the best on the Galway coast”.
Fiddaun Island is an anglicisation of Oileán an Fheadáin — the exact meaning of which is obscure, possibly ‘Island of the Channel’.
Unlike Island Eddy, Fiddaun has always been uninhabited and there are not even archaeological remnants which are often found in unpopulated islands, to bear witness to human activity. This one is strictly for the birds.
: No ferry. Kayak from Killeenaran Pier.
: birdwatchireland.ie
southdublinbirds.com
Daily Mirror, 17.03/1980
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