Declan Murphy - The Spirit of the River: A Quest for the Kingfisher

The

SPIRIT

of the

RIVER

The

SPIRIT

of the

RIVER

A Quest for the

KINGFISHER

DECLAN MURPHY

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

Dublin

First published 2021 by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS LTD

6263 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7, Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Copyright Declan Murphy, 2021

Illustrations Clodagh Power

Photographs John Murphy

ISBN 978 1 84351 80 20

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP record is available from the British Library.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

The Lilliput Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaon.

Typeset by Niall McCormack

Printed in Spain by Graphy Cems

For Luke & Emily
With all my love

Ireland; County Wicklow; Avoca; Dale House; Merrigans Field; Mount Platt; the Meetings of the Waters all words so familiar to me, yet places I have yet to see and visit. These words, along with the Avoca Mines, run through the heart of my family.

My grandpa Jim is a geologist who took his family to live in the Vale of Avoca. They lived in Dale House, surrounded by lawns, a huge vegetable garden, a giant apple tree and a rocky hill covered in rhododendrons and bracken. At the bottom of the drive was a small orchard and a stream that ran parallel down the hill in Ballygahan to the Avoca river. Nature was everywhere and my mum told me of hours spent out walking through the woods and fields and going to her secret place in the garden, a huge rhododendron where she would perch on a bough that was her seat.

From my earliest moments I have been drawn to nature. My first words were the the kak kak kak I copied from the magpie family that live near my house in north London. I was drawn to the row of lavender at our best friends Manuela and Julians house as soon as I could walk and the thousands, or so it seemed to me, honeybees that would visit for their daily feast. The present from Julian every year of his honeybees precious honey is a memory that always takes me back to our London home.

Grandpa Jim truly is a tree of knowledge. He has travelled the world and has shared with me all his stories, from his great escape from a bull elephant to his snake encounters in Africa, rescuing a sloth as it crossed a mining road and outswimming a water monitor lizard and the great sight of millions of flamingos over Lake Tanganyika. He grew up in Port Isaac in Cornwall and here began his tremendous knowledge of birds. Like Declan and his quest for the kingfisher, my grandfathers quest was to see the puffins at St Kilda, a boyhood dream he fulfilled with my grandmother when they were both in their sixties. To celebrate they climbed to the highest point on the island and shouted that they were the King and Queen of the World.

Grandpa Jim has shared his great knowledge and love of nature and its animals with me and so sparked my enquiring mind, allowing me to ask as many questions as I want. He almost always has the answer and if he doesnt, he has amongst his hundreds of books one that can give me the answer. Grandpa has a giant family atlas that my mother remembers from when she was a child and inside are some well-thumbed page, one of which is Ireland. And there on the page, as I scan down, next to Arklow is Avoca, with the blue of the rivers prominent and streaking through the green to the sea.

As an environmentalist I feel great empathy and emotion with a lot of Declans words as he talks about his childhood. I understand his constant search for knowledge and needing answers to the hows and the whys. The theme of family runs through his book not only just for himself but also the closeness and care he feels for every animal, bird and insect he comes across. His desire to learn more and feed his need to be amongst nature was satisfied to a point by the love and care of his family. Walks along the stream, holidays in woodlands and nature books stacked on every surface in his room. Even though his parents didnt understand his craving for knowledge about nature, they supported him in all he did. I feel it completely when I read the first chapters. Declans family were always protective of him and in doing so helped him and enabled him as he grew up and made nature his lifes work.

Walking through the tall grass along the river with Declan as I read his words was pure joy to me. I could see the dippers and the woodpeckers and the halcyon streak of blue. As I read every day I looked forward to the adventures of the birds. I spoke with my Grandpa Jim about the river and he told me where he thought the places might be and his memories of the river in Wicklow and the nature around it. He has many bird books and showed me pictures of all the birds that were now, because of Declans words, so familiar to me. Even his use of onomatopoeia to illustrate the call of the birds makes the book come alive.

When I met Jane Goodall, she told me the story of how trees communicate with each other, and from that moment I have never walked through a wood in the same way. I started noticing how fallen trees still grow new shoots and how these trees are fed by the others around them. Declan mentions the unnoticed birds that arent so colourful yet their daily life is as busy and remarkable as their beautifully coloured feathered friends. These words have stayed with me and I have made a point since finishing the book whenever I am out walking in the woods to make time to listen and notice as many of their songs as I can and paying attention to exactly what the birds are doing. My eyes are now noticing their subtle colours more intently and hearing their individual songs in the wood that is their theatre.

Thank you Declan for sharing your journey along the river, and letting me delve into the lives of the dipper, the woodpecker, the wagtails, the kingfisher and the goosander, the fox, the otter and the mink. The daily lives of this animal community is surely a nature series in itself. This book is a joy from word to word and I heartily recommend it to be on every schools reading list. Any budding naturalist will be thrilled to have a copy.

Lilly Platt, February 2021 Global Youth Environmentalist and Activist

MY PREVIOUS BOOK, A Life in the Trees , came about as a result of my interest in the great spotted woodpecker. However, that species story, and my interest in it, did not finish with that books conclusion. I continued to follow the lives of those woodpeckers and was delighted to discover that they still had many new secrets to share with me in the years that followed.

Throughout my writing of that book, I watched and tracked other animals with the same keenness, but there were simply not enough hours in the day to study everything. As great spotted woodpeckers have continued to increase in numbers throughout Ireland, they have now become a more common sight, and are easier to study and observe. As such, I began to dedicate more of my time to following the lives of the other animals that lived along the same river that flowed through those woodpeckers homeland.