Seán Ronayne told David Hennessy about the award-winning documentary Birdsong which has come to BBC.
Kathleen Harris’ award- winning debut film Birdsong is now available on BBC iPlayer.
Birdsong follows ornithologist Seán Ronayne from Cobh, Co. Cork, on his mission to record the sound of every bird species in Ireland – nearly 200 birds.
For his mission, he travels to some of the Ireland’s most beautiful and remote locations to capture its most elusive species and soundscapes.
Having been praised at both international film festivals and after its television premiere in Ireland, where audiences noted the film’s beautiful landscapes, its stirring soundscapes and it’s sensitive exploration of living with autism, the film was acquired by the BBC to bring Sean’s story to a UK audience.
The film won the Best Story prize at the European Wildlife Film Awards, following previously won awards at the prestigious Jackson Wild Awards in the United States and the
Festival International du Film Ornithologique in France.
It has also been nominated for an RTS ROI Award.
Seán chatted to us about Birdsong.
Seán Ronayne (37) is an ornithologist wildlife sound-recordist, award-winning author, and environmental activist from Cobh, Co. Cork.
Seán has spent a life immersed in nature.
After studying Zoology and then a Master’s in Marine Biology, both at UCC, Seán worked at a seabird sanctuary in the UK.
He then returned to Ireland to enrol in a Master’s in Ecological Impact Assessment, specialising in ornithology.
He secured his first professional ornithology job in 2017, and in 2018 he moved to Barcelona with his partner Alba, a Catalan native, where he began recording birds and wildlife in earnest.
Upon returning to Ireland in 2021, he embarked on a mission to document the vocalisations of every Irish bird species, a daunting task revealing the precarious state of Irish ecology.
With 63% of its birds at risk of extinction and minimal native woodland, Seán utilises his recordings and narratives to advocate for nature’s preservation, sharing the beauty and urgency of Irish biodiversity.
He has now just three species left to record, out of almost 200, and has amassed a collection of over 12,000 recordings of Irish birds and other wildlife.
His first book Nature Boy, won Irish Biography of the Year (2024), and was also shortlisted for overall Irish Book of the Year (2024). He is currently writing his second book.
Where did your love of birds but also nature in general come from?
“From the get go, I was out in nature with my father.
“He would bring me out to Cuskinny Nature Reserve when I was in the pram and he would imitate all of the bird sounds and ask me to guess the species.
“I was only about one or two then so I started listening and interpreting birds since I was a little tiny baby.
“That went on and I went down to study a degree in zoology in UCC.
“I did a master’s in marine biology, master’s in ecological impact assessment.
“I made it a career then and it just kind of grew arms and legs.
“I met my partner Alba here in Cork.
“She’s from Barcelona and she was tired of the cold weather so she said, ‘Let’s go to Barcelona’.
“I said, ‘Okay’.
“So we did that and that’s when I bought my first sound recorder, because over there there were lots of new birds, and sound recording those new birds allowed me to figure out what it was back home.
“That was kind of the start of the sound recording element.
“And then we moved back and I said I was going to sound record every bird in Ireland and everybody kind of slapped their head and said, ‘Oh God, here we go again’.
“But I was serious about it and I made a website, I started up a Twitter account and I just started sound recording everything and sharing the sounds.
“And it was very well received with people.
“I guess people aren’t used to interacting with nature in the sonic aspect as much as they are the visual/
“I think that it was something novel to people to be logging on to Twitter and getting bird sounds from around the country each day.
“It definitely resonated and took off from there.
“And then Kathleen was on an assignment where she was interviewing people with unusual jobs from Ireland and I guess I fitted that category and we did a short video for the Irish Times.
“It was great.
“I knew the camera was there but I forgot about it so I just was kind of in my own world, doing my thing and getting up and running away from her in the middle of the interview- which they kept in the video- because there was a bird calling or whatnot.
“People found it funny.
“People thought it was interesting.
“Kathleen thought that maybe there was something more to it and then she asked me if I wanted to do the documentary.”
What kind of reactions have you been getting to the documentary? Have people been getting in touch interested in your work?
“After the documentary, it’s just been a rollercoaster ride to be honest with you.
“I’m doing an Irish tour now.
“If the venues are not sold out, they’re selling out.
“I’ve 35 venues now for this talk around Ireland and it’s absolutely flying.
“I hope to do a UK tour next Spring.
“There’s people coming up to us in the street.
“Everyone’s been lovely saying lovely things like for the first time, they’re listening to birds and they’ve bought binoculars, and they’ve got their kids out, and they’ve got a bird feeder.
“That’s what it’s all about to me.
“I don’t care if people recognise me or know my name, it’s about reconnecting people with nature and helping people to rewild their minds and to fall in love with nature because it needs our help and I think that people don’t realise that a love for birds in nature isn’t just for hippies and dreamers.
“This is something that’s essential to our future on this planet because if birds are dropping off, it’s not just the loss of this song or that song or this beautiful plumage, it’s an indication that the land that sustains them is failing.
“And guess what? We need that land too so if everything is failing, it’s a sign that things are on the decline and it’s going to affect everything.
“63% of Ireland’s birds are now at risk of extinction.
“It’s a grim statistic.
“It’s never been that bad so we need people to care about these things and to look out for them.”
That’s the kind of crisis we’re at and how important this issue is…
“We live in an economic system that requires continuous growth and that’s the ultimate problem because we live in a planet with finite resources so a model with infinite growth is going to meet a brick wall eventually.
“We need to look at alternatives yesterday and stop treating the planet that we live on as a blank canvas to do with as we please for our own needs as a species.
“We don’t live here alone.
“We’ve got neighbours and not only do we need to live in harmony, stepping outside this door every morning you enter a world of inexplicable beauty and wonder and to strip that away is sad.
“Who wants to walk out to meet a wall of booming traffic and an air full of smog and a lack of wildlife, that’s grim but to step outside and to hear a chorus of birds or badgers and foxes running through the woods, that’s soul nourishing stuff.”
In the documentary you film the last two known ring ouzel birds in Ireland, that shows how delicate the situation is..
“That population had been dwindling and dwindling and dwindling and that one pair isn’t just gonna make a stand. That’s gonna drop too and then one day, they’ll be gone and the likelihood is that they’ll never return.
“That scene and the recording of that bird was meant to stand as a powerful reminder and a wake up call to people that extinction isn’t something that just happens over in the Amazon.
“Extinction is something that is happening right here and right now.
“I’ve had people argue to me and say, ‘Isn’t extinction a natural part of the process?’
“Yes, that’s true but the rate of extinction that we’re currently facing is, I think, up to 1,000 times greater than any event we’ve ever seen so it’s massively exacerbated by our actions so it’s an unnatural extinction event.
“So long as we continue to exploit the landscape on such a vast scale, these things will continue to drop.
“They’re not going to increase but the thing is, we know that it can and that’s where I do take hope from because there are projects in select areas in the country whereby the habitat is rehabilitated and the right things are put in place and species do bounce back.
“This is because of hands on habitat restoration.
“There’s a site in Mayo and it was a really important site for a particular bird called redneck, Red Necked Phalarope and again, the habitat was restored there and after 10 years, 10 years after restoration, they came back and now I think there’s eight pairs there and they’re spreading out and they’re turning up in new sites.
“So we know that all we need to do is give nature its space and not smother the land in our stuff, our stuff being intensive agriculture, roads, cities, all of that.”
Should the government do something? Would you like to see some kind of action to prevent such expansion/destruction?
“Of course.
“The government have a huge role to play.
“They’re the people that can enact legislation to make proper change on the ground.
“I get quite frustrated every year because in Ireland we have the lowest native woodland cover in all of Europe.
“I think it’s at about 1% and of that 1% I think 1% or less of the 1% is in good condition.
“We’re talking about a real tiny fraction of healthy native woodland in this country.
“Where animals do take refuge are in in the hedgerows.
“Because we have many fields in the country, those hedgerows act as a poor substitute for woodland, and even those aren’t safe.
“We have a hedge cutting ban every year between March and September and it’s just abused left, right and centre.
“There are too many loopholes.
“It’s a weak, meaningless law that’s massively open to interpretation and that’s taken advantage of every year so even these little veins of support are being stripped away, and that could easily be changed.
“It’s in stark contrast to our past because I was only reading about it recently when we had the Brehon laws in Ireland before English law came in, we venerated trees.
“Look at the ogham alphabet.
“The letters in that are all associated with trees in Ireland.
“We’re a people of trees and we had a huge connection with those trees, now we’ve gone the opposite way where we’re hammering them, we’re cutting them down.
“I think we’ve forgotten who we are and in forgetting who we are, we’re losing all of our wonderful neighbours.”
Have the values of respecting nature been forgotten?
“I think a lot of it is largely forgotten.
“The evidence is there in the statistics, sadly.
“But I think it’s important to talk about these things.
“That’s why I do these talks: To show people, to introduce people to all of these birds and show them how wonderful they really are, because they are.
“Sometimes you go to the woods and you see these kind of fake fairy doors attached to trees, hammered onto trees.
“It seems harmless.
“It makes me realise that we’ve lost that natural sense of wonder in nature to the point that we now have to hammer on bits of plastic to create that when really it’s right there waiting to be rekindled.
“For example there are jayes in those woods out there.
“I’ve recorded jayes over the last few years doing some crazy things.
“I’ve had them perfectly imitate magpie, hooded crow, buzzard, barking dog.
“I’ve recorded birds that fly from Ireland to Senegal and when they return, they’re imitating sounds of wildlife from Senegal, imitating sounds from the Iberian Peninsula, imitating the sounds of the birds around them in Cork, so these birds are literally telling me their life story through song and all of the other species that they’ve encountered along the way.
“It’s like stamps on a passport.
“Who needs to hammer fairy doors onto a tree when you’ve got incredible natural stories in our wildlife like that?
“There’s a purpose to every vocalisation out there.
“They’re communicating important aspects of their lives and to tap into that is to tap into another world.
“It’s really incredible.
“I was just looking at a flock of Brent geese there in Cork harbour yesterday.
“Brent geese come here in the winter.
“They migrate from North East Arctic Canada to come to us.
“It just blew my mind to think that when they return to Canada, they need to fend off polar bears from their nests.
“Again, tell that to a kid, ‘Who you’re looking at there in a few weeks is going to be hanging out with polar bears.
“There are these far flung, exotic places that they may never get a chance to visit and may only see in books and stories, but these geese see them.
“You’re connecting them to other amazing worlds.
“That’s what I like to try to communicate with people.
“And I really believe that if people knew that and really understood that, we wouldn’t let these birds disappear in the way that that we are.
“I went to schools doing talks of late and I asked the kids in one place, ‘I assume you all know what the dawn chorus is’.
“Silence.
“They were looking at me like I had two heads.
“They had no idea what I was talking about.
“This is down to, of course, a lack of nature based education.
“And this is something that the government could step up and do, bring a legitimate nature education into our classrooms from day one.
“It’s so important that people grow up with an understanding and a respect for nature because if they do that, they’ll bring that forward into adulthood and I think that it will be in a much better place.”
As you say you found a jaye imitating the barking of your dog, Toby. How incredible that they do that..
“There’s two kind of broad theories behind that.
“We can’t prove it, at least not now, as to why that jaye was doing that.
“One is that the jaye recognises the dog as a threat.
“We know that the jaye obviously recognises what species it is and it knows what sound it makes.
“It looked down.
“It registered it’s a dog.
“My dog was not barking.
“It knows the dog barks so the jaye starts barking at Toby, the idea would be that it’s imitating the sound of this predator to trick it so that it thinks there’s another dog coming and so that it runs away and then it protects its young.
“Another theory is that it’s looking at the dog and it’s conveying the specifics of the threat to other jayes around.
“For example if it’s imitating a dog it’s saying, ‘Get up off the ground. Stop picking up those acorns. There’s a dog coming’.
“But if it imitates a buzzard it’s saying, ‘Okay, get your heads down. There’s a buzzard coming, because it could pick you out of the tree’.
“It’s just a demonstration as to how little we know really about birds and how intelligent they really are.”
There’s a more personal aspect to the to the documentary.
You also speak about your autism diagnosis that came late in life.
Have you had a reaction to that as well? And what’s that been like?
“My autism diagnosis was one of the greatest revelations I ever had because it’s not something that I kind of picked up in later life, it was always there.
“People ask me, ‘What does it matter if you know that you have it or not?’
“Well it was very important to me because now that I understand autism and how it kind of plays out in me, it allowed me to better understand myself and it allowed me to embrace the many positives that came with it and it allowed me to address some of the negatives that come with it.
“I’m not afraid of speaking about it.
“Why should I be? It’s who I am.
“And there’s nothing wrong with it.
“And when I go to the talks, there are often parents with autistic kids and they’ll often come to the stage at the end of the talks and they’ll come and say hello and talk about the birds that they like and ask me questions.
“And the parents will say, ‘Thank you so much for inspiring some hope in us and letting us know that my kid can be fine’.
“To know that I’m affecting people in that way I never thought about things in that way.
“I never expected to experience that.
“But it’s beautiful.”
What is next?
“I’m starting to sound record under water now.
“I’m starting to sound record fish and crabs, prawns and the hope is to get out there and start doing whales and dolphins after that.
“Nature is just a constant, ever giving, mysterious, beautiful thing and I’ll never stop exploring it so there will always be something.
“I just want people to take my work as a call to arms but to realise that there’s great beauty out there.
“Although it’s diminishing, it’s still there and that’s something to be very happy about so get out there and reconnect with it.
“Love it, cherish it and get stuck into it.
“You definitely won’t regret it.”
Seán is touring Ireland.
He comes to Mountain Festival in the Lake District in November.
For more information, click here.
