Friday, September 10, 2010 Previous editions
IT is refreshing to discover that I haven’t lost my rock pooling skills and that the son, with whom I enjoyed so many hours of exploring the inter-tidal zone of our south-west coast, hasn’t forgotten the fish, their names, or the specialised habitat in which they can be found.
ON some mornings last week the slight chill in the air and the golden sunlight would make one believe autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, had already arrived.
LAST Sunday week was Flying Ant Day on the Seven Heads of west Cork.
THIS week’s column must necessarily be discursive if I’m to mention even half the events I’ve noticed or heard of from readers.
SHANGHAI to Sherkin, a contrast that would make one’s head spin.
A FEW months ago a reader told me a pair of elegant, ringed pigeons had arrived at his farmyard and settled in, roosting in a barn.
LAST weekend I had, nestling in my hand, one of prettiest birds I’ve ever seen, a storm petrel.
LAST week a reader wrote to give me a fascinating account entitled, The Apprenticeship of Swallows, recounting the drama she saw unfold from her apartment window.
I’VE just read that in the US, Hurricane Alex has pushed a huge oil slick towards Grand Isle on the Louisiana coast, already in imminent danger of inundation from BP’s Deepwater Horizon which is pumping between 50,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea.
MORE often than not, this summer, we wake to skies as peerless blue as a hedge sparrow’s egg.
BUTTERCUPS and butterflies – two Speckled Wood butterflies waltz around one another in spirals in the morning sunlight under the beeches across the stream as I step out into the yard.
A READER tells me a pair of racing pigeons, with rings, arrived at his farm four months ago, stayed around the yard and have now hatched two eggs, both parents sitting.
UPON our return from Germany and the Czech Republic we were immediately grateful that we lived in Ireland where the temperature, as we drove west from Cork Airport, was 17.5°C.
AS we drove east from Munich after a comfortable flight from Cork with our national airline and its ever courteous staff, we crossed a range of heavily-wooded hills relieved by golden meadows: the gold being dandelions packed as tightly as pixels in a photograph.
SHAGS, despite their prejudicial name, are elegant birds, much more attractive than their cousins, the cormorants.
LAST week, as we daily – and sometimes hourly – watched the nest perched high on the bare branch of a beech tree opposite the kitchen window, we saw the small heads, that shot up like jack-in-the-boxes, grow more mistle thrush-like every day.
NEXT weekend, the May Bank Holiday, there is to be a Walking-Talking Festival on Cape Clear Island, Oileán Chléire, in Roaring Water Bay in West Cork.
I HAVE been revisiting walking routes for which I wrote guides over the years for a Selected Walks of West Cork to be published by Collins Press in Spring 2011.
ON Easter Monday, at noon, newly released after a few days in the garage (by which I mean the hospital), I sat on a tussock in a warm spot by the bay and listened to the surf gently break and thanked the gods for being alive on such a day.
AMONGST roadside swathes of celandine lies a bag of suppurating household rubbish.
YESTERDAY, I saw a heron fly overhead with a twig in its beak.
I WAS impressed with The Shorebirds of Ireland, recently published by The Collins Press, a beautifully-produced treasury of well-written, informative text by Jim Wilson, with a gallery of wonderful bird photographs by Mark Carmody.
IT is difficult for the self-employed to stay indoors these days when the sky is blue and the world outside bathed in sunlight, and there is – even! – warmth in sheltered corners so that one could close one’s eyes and think one is on the Mediterranean.
AS Alice in Wonderland said, things gets “curiouser and curioser” and she was “so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English”.
A STRETCH in the evenings and with it nature, although a little late, is busy again.
SAINT Valentine’s Day 2010 remains memorable as one of the most all-round perfect February days for years.
A Johnny-the-bogs regularly stands sentinel at the end of an old pier, Tanner’s Pier, now reduced to a corridor of wrack-grown rocks opposite what was once the Earl of Shannon’s summer house, now the elegant Courtmacsherry Hotel.
THIS week, I will diverge from reports of local events in nature, the marvellous humpback whale displays in Wexford, and the shoals of sprats in the seas off west Cork, to tell readers about a book I’ve greatly enjoyed called Birding from the Hip: A Sound Approach Anthology.
A GREY adolescent seal and two pure white adult spoonbills in front of Timoleague Abbey in the falling light of a mid-January Sunday were only two of the delights of west Cork this winter.
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