‘Total Immersive Obsession’: Meet the Man on a Mission to Record Every Bird in Ireland

The ornithologist Seán Ronayne’s all-consuming quest has made him an unlikely celebrity, and his passion for nature is raising awareness about the seriousness of Ireland’s ecological crisis

One of Seán Ronayne’s earliest memories is walking in the countryside near his home with his father. “I cried a lot as a child and I was hyperactive,” he says, “When I was three or four years old, my dad would take me out to calm me down. In the woods, he’d mimic the sound of the birds and ask me what they were. Looking back, I was trained to be an ornithologist almost from the pram. That’s really where it all started.”

As he grew older, Ronayne, who was something of a solitary child, would spend a lot of time at his kitchen window in Cobh, County Cork, peering through binoculars at the birds feeding in his garden and writing down their names in a notebook. At 14, he could identify most of the birds he saw by the sounds they made.