Forthcoming title: Clare Island Volume 9: Birds

Volume 9 in the New Survey of Clare Island series has just gone to print and will be in all good bookshops in August. The book features a systematic list comprised of records of bird sightings that stretch from 1887 to 2018. The result of almost 20 years of fieldwork, it is an invaluable source for future monitoring of birds on Clare Island and beyond. Explore Clare Island’s avifauna, including the seabirds, land birds and waterbirds, and investigate the curious absence of breeding rooks from the island. 

The first Clare Island Survey of 1909–11 was the most ambitious natural history project ever undertaken in Ireland and the first major biological survey of a specific area carried out in the world. The ‘Birds’ paper included in that survey was written by Richard J. Ussher and was based on fieldwork conducted on the island between 1909 and 1911. Ussher’s ‘Aves’ paper, however, also summarised details of the avifauna of a wider area in the west of Ireland—mainly the Counties of Galway and Mayo—a theme that was revisited several times by the late Major Robert F. Ruttledge. The current ‘Birds’ volume focuses exclusively on Clare Island and applies modern methods of census. 

The book is coming out in August but can be pre-ordered here.

About the series:
The Royal Irish Academy’s New Survey of Clare Island is a unique multidisciplinary endeavour, which, together with Robert Lloyd Praeger’s first Clare Island Survey, provides an invaluable body of research informing future conservation of natural and built heritage of Ireland and Europe. Read more about the project here.