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Unions opposed to cuts are subject to law, says KennyTeacher unions and others that remain opposed to €300m public sector pay cut proposals will be subjected to laws cutting higher salaries and other work changes, Enda Kenny said yesterday.
UCC plan will save taxpayers millions University College Cork intends to be largely self-funding within five years, saving the Irish taxpayer millions of euro a year.
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Woolwich terror killing: Security services face probeThe British parliament is to investigate if security services could have done more to prevent the murder of a soldier hacked to death in a London street after it emerged that his suspected killers were known to intelligence officers.
Woolwich killing: Further arrests as spotlight turns on security servicesBritish police arrested two more people yesterday in a hunt for accomplices of two British men of Nigerian descent accused of hacking a soldier to death on a London street in revenge for wars in Muslim countries.
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Noonan examining ways to capitalise banks It is believed the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan told the IMF that he will look to Contingent Convertible Capital (CoCo) Notes if the banks need additional capital buffers following the stress tests.
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The magic is in the anticipationULSTER SFC QUARTER-FINAL:Donegal v Tyrone For too long, we've been decrying the anti-climactic starts to thevarious provincial championships. Now we have a genuine no-holds barred contest in Ballybofey.
O’Brien out for final as Schmidt takes issue with Gatland Joe Schmidt has opted against speculating whether Sean O'Brien will miss the opening weeks of the British and Irish Lions tour after omitting the injured flanker from his squad of 23 for today's RaboDirect Pro12 decider.
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A woman of mettle: how Iron Lady rose to powerFirst volume of Margaret Thatcher's authorised biography is predictably flattering, but not a hagiography, says Shaun Connolly
Best of the Week's TV (Saturday, May 25 - Friday 31)Highlights include Colin Stafford Johnson's new series on the Shannon, and highly-rated new spy drama The Americans.
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Digging for spuds gives me a bird’s eye view
By Dick Warner
MY birthday is on Jul 21 and one of the minor ways in which it is celebrated is that I dig the first new potatoes from the garden.
I live in a part of the country that gets night frosts until quite late in the spring so I’ve learned to sprout or ‘chit’ the seed indoors but resist planting it out until well into April.My favourite variety is Sharpe’s Express. It’s old-fashioned and not particularly productive but the flavour is superb. I was pleasantly surprised this year when I dug the first couple of plants for the birthday dinner. The crop looks like it will be the best for many years in terms of both the size and the number of the tubers.
My garden is on a great mound of esker gravel and the soil is very free draining. Because of this, in an average year the vegetables struggle to get enough moisture, even though I add lots of organic matter to try and trap the rain before it drains down into the gravel. But the exceptional amount of rain in June and July this year meant that for once there was no water shortage. It’s an ill wind, as they say.
While I was digging the potatoes, I was distracted by a pair of wood pigeons coming in to feed their young in a nest in the hedge. Compared to most bird species, male wood pigeons take paternity seriously. They help build the nest, which isn’t a very exacting task as it’s a simple platform of twigs, they share in the incubation of the eggs, there are usually just two of them, and they share the task of feeding the young.
When they first hatch, the young are pretty helpless creatures. They are fed initially on an extraordinary substance called ‘pigeon’s milk’. It’s not really milk, of course, only mammals can make that, but it looks very like it. It’s made up of a white liquid which the adults secrete from glands in their crops and mix with finely ground food items. Maybe not milk but very similar to pureed baby food
When the young birds get a little bit bigger they are weaned on to solid food. The two pigeons I was watching were coming to the nest very regularly and I was curious to know what they were feeding their young. So, when the potatoes were dug, I followed one of them. It flew a short distance into the middle of a field, picked at something on the ground for a couple of minutes and then flew back to the nest.
I walked out into the field to the spot where it had landed. There was a patch of white clover in the grass with lots of tender young leaves. So, mystery solved; the pigeons were harvesting leaf vegetables while I was harvesting root vegetables.
Wood pigeons are very opportunistic breeders. Any spell of decent weather between February and October will tempt them into having a go at rearing a brood. They fail quite often, particularly early in the year when there is a lack of leaf cover and the nests are easy for magpies or grey crows to spot. But their motto is obviously ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’. Despite the small clutch size there are plenty of wood pigeons in the country and they are augmented by winter migrants.
This long nesting season got the Irish government into trouble when it introduced a shooting season for wood pigeons from Jun 1 to Jan 31. The EU had to point out to them that a shooting season that included part of the breeding season was illegal.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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