On a sunny morning a few weeks ago, Dave Suddaby, the reserves manager with the conservation organisation BirdWatch Ireland, led me across the machair to where the fairy birds were nesting in Annagh Marsh. “Fairy bird” is the name given to the red-necked phalarope by the Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger after he encountered the species in this area during the early 1900s.
As we walked, the habitat restoration that drew this diminutive wader back to breed here in 2015, after an absence of more than 30 years, was already casting a spell over me. The air was full of the sounds of lapwings, redshanks, corncrakes and snipes. The sward was a dazzle of wildflowers. Eventually we came to a narrow freshwater pool, where we stopped to wait.
