NORTH Belfast’s Daniel Graham has a dream job as an electronic technician on massive ships sailing around the world – and his latest posting is in the Persian Gulf off Saudi Arabia, helping build an oil rig.
Birds often use ships as a resting point – many of them exhausted in the middle of migration. And last week former St Enda's hurler Daniel spotted a new arrival – this time not an exhausted bird, but an injured one.
It was a tiny brown bird and its leg was obviously dislocated.You can even see it hanging limp in Daniel’s photo. Daniel was able to pick it up and take it to safety. He offered it fresh water – which it gladly drank – and tried to feed it various items of food. It refused everything – until Danial offered it a fly!
It couldn’t get enough of them – and Daniel started emptying the flies from the electric fly-killing machines. The wee bird would only eat the fresh ones – it gave each fly a shake, and if bits fell off, it spat it out!
The bird soon realised it had a new friend. It would fly around the room and then land on Daniel’s shoulder, as seen here. Daniel brought it up on deck, but it wouldn’t budge. The dislocated leg was getting in the way of its wing and when it tried to fly any distance, it crash-landed again.
SHIPMATES: Daniel Graham in the Persian Gulf with his unidentified and tragic little friend
Daniel emailed various vets in the town he was due to come ashore at, offering to cover the cost of the treatment. Finally one came back with an offer of help. “The vet will check it and of course do the best we can to treat it, then give it back to you or release it,” they wrote. And so Daniel delayed his June flight home by a day so he had time to drop off his new friend.
But it wasn’t to be. It’s impossible to find enough fresh insects to feed a bird like this. Dúlra has no idea what species it is but it could be a flycatcher – and on Monday Daniel woke up to find the wee bird dead.
Still, well done Daniel – it’s amazing the lengths some people will go to help injured animals and birds. Any birds passing through the Persian Gulf now know they have a friend indeed!
• A reader stumbled upon this incredible ‘nest’ (right) while up in Donegal.
He was walking along a remote beach on Inishowen when he spotted these four eggs just sitting on the sand like they were small stones. It look a while for Dúlra to definitively identify them, but they are the eggs of a little ringed plover, feadóigin chladaigh in Irish.
Like so many things that readers send to Dúlra, this is a rarity. This tiny wader – about the size of a sparrow – is a rare summer visitor to Ireland. In fact it’s believed that only a handful breed here.
Dúlra once happened on a baby ringed plover on Tory Island, but its smaller cousin is rarely seen never mind found breeding here.
What Dúlra finds fascinating about these birds is that there isn’t any nest at all. The bird just finds a remote spot on a beach with a few scattered stones and lays its eggs there, using the stones as camouflage. If an intruder arrives on to this Donegal beach, they’ll need eagle eyes to distinguish the eggs from the stones. However, they could easily be trampled by a visitor or a dog.
Thankfully, few people visit this beach. You could put a (bilingual) sign up saying ‘Out of bounds – breeding birds’. But perversely, that only attracts people – especially birdwatchers!
According to our reader, the waders have picked the perfect beach. He says he normally has this beach to himself, even during mid-summer.
And by then, the even smaller little ringed plovers will up and running with their parents.
