Buy your tickets and set your alarms for this Sunday, November 24th at 7pm GMT, for the international online premier of the award-winning environmental documentary, Birdsong. The film, directed by Kathleen Harris, follows ornithologist Seán Ronayne in his epic quest to record the calls of all the bird species in Ireland. Tickets (€12) include the broadcast followed by Q&A with Seán, with an additional on-demand access through December 1st.
Kathleen, who had been a video journalist at the Irish Times, contacted Seán in 2022 with the intention of interviewing him for a portrait video series on people with interesting jobs. As Seán kept running off camera to find the birds that caught his ear, Kathleen quickly realized that there was the potential for a much bigger story. She is drawn to stories that explore the relationship with the natural world, and to stories that can use the personal to talk about a much bigger topic. In this case, more than half of Ireland’s nearly 200 bird species are red or amber-listed (endangered or of conservation concern)—a fact that made Seán’s project a race against time. Kathleen left her job at the paper and spent the next year making this film.
While the scenery is visual stunning, it is Seán’s passion that is the driving force behind the film. Even as a child, he was always happiest in nature. Like many who are obsessed by a single narrow topic and find socialization challenging, Seán is on the autism spectrum, a fact that he only learned as an adult, through a journey suggested by his partner, Alba Novell Capdevila. His hypersensitivity to sound worked (and continues to work) as a superpower. Seán sets up microphones all over, including two that were running non-stop for three years. Doing analysis of thousands upon thousands of recordings gave him a depth of knowledge that allows him to pick out individual birds in the midst of a chorus of sound.
Seán Ronaye
With limited experience in longer works, Kathleen enlisted Ross Whitaker to be producer for the film, and he helped identify markers and beats within the hours of footage. There is no narrator, and the work is driven by Seán words and actions. Although there is a message of hope, the statistics for Irish birds are grim. Seán noted that although Ireland thinks of itself as “The Emerald Isle,” roughly 2/3 is improved agricultural grassland — not habitat for many of the native species, and “not the green you want.” One heart-breaking segment focuses on the attempt to record the Ring ouzel (Turdus torquatus). Seán left a recorder buried in the heath for three months, and then sat by his computer to scan through the sonographs. While the mission was a success, the ouzels were the last confirmed pair in the entire country. “It is the sound of extinction,” Seán said.
The movie concludes with breath-taking images and sound of a starling murmuration. The mass of birds, with their near instantaneously changes in the direction, are confusing to predators. Collectively, the wingbeats sound like the pounding of a waterfall.
The film has a reach far beyond birders. It is gorgeously shot, and will appeal to anyone who loves nature documentaries along the lines of Planet Earth. Filming ranged from the karst landscape in the Burren region, to Donegal in the northwest, to the seabird colonies on the Skellig islands. Throughout, Seán finds places that are fragments of hope, sections of wildness that could form the start of work to bring nature back.
Like the award-winning film Free Solo, which profiled rock climber Alex Honnald on his quest to be the first to perform a free solo climb of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National park, Birdsong focuses on one person’s drive to complete something far beyond the ordinary — and in learning from that, there is an appeal for all of us.
To learn more:
Seán maintains a free database of Irish soundscapes, Irishwildlifesounds.com, and an album of Irish soundscape tracks. His memoir, Nature Boy: A Journey of Birdsong and Belonging , was published this fall. A lecture, “Now What? How do we protect something we do not love and do not understand?,” given at The Conference and Media Evolution in Sweden, is available on YouTube.
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