In Harold’s Cross, a locally famous bird is immortalised in a new kids’ book

On Monday afternoon in Mount Argus Park, a heron stood very still in a pond surrounded by willow trees, their branches dangling low towards the water.

Four ducks paddled around its feet, and a moorhen skittered across a little island nearby. In the sky, a river of clouds rushed past the sun, and its pale light went and came with them.

On shore, a few metres back from the water, Caitlin and Dylan Hawkins sat on a bench together while their son Dawson joyfully ran circles around them.

“We come out here every day, and he’s always here,” Caitlin Hawkins says about the heron. “If we come out with a picnic or anything he’s always trying to get the scraps.”

Walking by on the path a little later Robyn Carey says, of the bird, “Oh my god, he’s my friend!”

She sits sometimes under one of the willows, with her tarot cards, and he comes and says hello, she says. “He definitely rules the roost around here.”

On a little bridge over the water, nearby, Terry Cassidy says he knows the bird well too. “Bertie,” he says its name is. “With a name like heron, he’s gonna be named that, isn’t he?”

Now this locally famous bird, named in a punny way after the former Taoiseach, is the hero of a new kids’ book, by Adrian Watson, who lives nearby in Harold’s Cross, and is a commandant in the Irish Army.

“The lads are saying, ‘Jaysus, where is this coming out of?’” Watson said on late Monday morning, seated in the bustling Third Space Cafe in Smithfield.

Where indeed?

Watson has spent 26 years in the army, in Ireland and abroad.

But before any of that, he was a kid growing up on a farm in Roscommon, he says, in a black Levi’s t-shirt, his coffee cooling in front of him as he recalls those times.

“I remember, you know, we kind of, in the mornings, we’d get up during the summer at home on the farm, and my father’d be like, ‘Okay, everyone – I’ve two older brothers – and he’s like, we’re all going out doing this stuff,” he says.

Watson was not enthusiastic, as he recalls it. “I’d be sitting there going, this is the last thing I want to do. I don’t want to know about this stuff. Yeah, I want to walk around the house here with clean shoes and feel clean.”

Then, one day, taking pity on him, his mother told him she’d seen something about a short story competition, and said he could stay inside and write an entry. “And that was my out of doing the farming,” Watson says.

He worked at it and worked at it and eventually entered a story called “The Day I Grew a Tail”, which won this national competition for writers under 12, back in 1988, he says.

So the writing bug’s been with him a long time, even though his career path took him to the army, he says.

“I suppose I’m creative in my own way, but at the same time, it’s unusual in my job, spec, if you know what I’m saying,” he says.

Bertie, the bird

Mornings, Watson runs around Mount Argus Park, and there’s this bird there.

“Basically, there’s a crane in there,” he says. “There’s a crane in there, since 2007 since I moved there.”

One day he saw a woman feeding the bird, and stopped to talk to her, he says.

“And I said to her, ‘What’s the story with this bird?’ Because it’s on its own in the pond, although there’s a load of ducks,” he says.

“And she said to me, ‘This is Bertie. Bertie is here for years.’ And I said to her, ‘And you feed it?’ She goes, ‘Yeah, only bacon.’ Which is funny, and I was thinking, ‘My God, this, this fella is getting it good. He’s getting bacon.’”

Is Watson good with his birds? Would this be a crane, or a heron, or an egret, or some other long-legged wading bird?

“Well, look, some will say it’s a crane. Let’s, okay, so let’s go with heron on this one,” he says, sitting in the cafe in Smithfield.

“Obviously, I suppose it makes more sense,” he says. “It’s a heron, so she called it Bertie.”

“Anyway, I suppose it was always in my head, where did this lad come out of?” So he came up with Bertie’s story, and wrote it down.

And now Bertie, is a 56-page paperback aimed at 9- to 11-year-olds, put out by UK-based Austin Macauley Publishers earlier this month.

Bertie, the book

In the book, Bertie and his family are living in a dismal, brutal zoo in Dublin, where with neglectful “wardens”, cruel visitors, and stints in solitary as punishment.

One day, a visitor bird-naps Bertie’s little sister, so, with help from his family, he tunnels out and goes on a quest across Dublin city in search of her.

Along the way, he faces dangers, learns lessons, falls in love, makes friends and eventually gathers a group of allies to help him – in an operation combining land, air and waterborne forces – rescue his sister from her cruel captor.

“It’s not just about the story,” says Watson, there are also lessons to be learned. “There’s a few little anecdotes in it, a bit of teamwork, a bit of resilience, a bit of drive. Hopefully kids can take a few bits from.”

“And, I suppose there’s a little bit of military stuff that’ll – I was big into the Famous Five when I was younger,” he says, referring to Enid Blyton’s series of adventure novels for kids.

“I just finished, you know, my joint command and staff course over nine months,” he says. In the book, “there’s a little bit of military strategy towards the end, that’ll probably make sense to a kid”.

And when local kids read the book, it’ll be fun for them to connect the character in the book with the real bird in the park. Even if it might be a different bird by now, really.

“I think we’re on Bertie Two at this stage,” Watson says. Something Cassidy, standing on the bridge in the park later, raises too. “I don’t know it’s the same heron,” he says.

Although Bertie is the kind and brave and good protagonist in the book, the bird that inspired the character is a bit more complex, locals say.

“You know those ducklings,” Cassidy says, standing on the bridge Monday and pointing over to the pond. “He eats them.”

But his fans in Harold’s Cross are forgiving. “He’s a lovely bird, even though he eats the babies,” says Caitlin Hawkins, once her little son Dawson is out of earshot.