PERHAPS even more fascinating than the multicoloured birds and butterflies seen on this Thai island just south of Burma are the ghost crabs, almost as invisible and fleeting as ghosts.
BANGERS at daybreak: it was Chinese New Year in Bangkok.
ALONG the south west coast, this is the seal-pupping season.
OUT on the channel, only 30 yards from the shore, three Great Northern divers are fishing.
AS I look out my workroom window the sun comes and goes in the yard.
MY visit to the National Aquarium of Ireland, the Galway Atlantaquaria, in October was enlightening and memorable.
MY brother told me that on the beaches near his apartment on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain, where we are staying, interesting shells could be found which are sometimes incorporated in jewellery.
TODAY, when we woke and opened the curtains, the skies over the Straits of Gibraltar were again peerless blue. The sea, azure and sparkling below them, broke on the sand in a white, crinoline frill.
WHEN, as children, my pals and I roamed the bogs, river banks and lake shores of Tipperary, Mayo and Donegal, we regularly came upon curlews’ nests and I’m afraid we may have sometimes filched an egg or two for our collections.
A FLURRY on the surface and a panicked splashing in the water only yards away from my feet as I walked along the beach on the first bright day for weeks: it was a shoal of big mullet caught unawares as they basked in the shallow water warmed by the sun.
I MUST have been the only Courtmacsherry resident not to have seen the flock of 16 glossy ibises that made the bay shore their home from October 4 to October 15.
THE sky was so blue and the sun so warm that my son and his pal took off their shirts to enjoy the weather as they drank raspberry beer outside a bar overlooking the River Vltava in the pretty town of Ceské Budejovice in Lower Bohemia in the Czech Republic.
THROUGH my work-room window, I look out at the mist hanging over the field beyond the beeches and my imaginings of an Indian summer are dissolved in water-vapour so dense the horses are like spectres walking riderless through cannon-smoke, lost in a region between heaven and hell.
AS I left to go looking for parasol mushrooms, I noticed the sedum and the valerian in the garden were teeming with butterflies and I couldn’t resist, as usual, stopping to take some photographs, such glorious creatures they were.
WOULD that the marine biologists working on eradicating Sargassum, an invasive brown weed, at Lough Hyne in west Cork, found a way to eliminate the green weed plaguing shallow bays all over Ireland.
THE Great Southern Trail promises to be one of the finest long-distance waymarked walks in Ireland.
LAST week, through the windows of a TransPennine train in the north of England, I saw sheep grazing the hill slopes.
MY youngest grandchild, Luca, aged three, visiting us from Bohemia in the Czech Republic, delights in feeding our adopted heron which stands as tall as himself.
WILD plants have flowered extravagantly this summer.
I NOTICE the dozen swallows and house martins, that sat on the wires above the village street in April and May, have multiplied.
WE have found remote, west Cork beaches free of the noxious green sea ‘lettuce’ that has plagued so many Irish estuaries and strands.
IT was a singular pleasure to be able to show off Ireland at its best to our visitors from the balmy isles of the Canaries.
A READER writes to tells me he recently picked up six dead crows beneath a rookery near his home.
LAST week, in Lisbon, I saw and heard farmers demonstrating against the Government in a demand for higher prices for milk and meat, and the survival of smallholders.
AT Monfrague National Park, in Extremadura in western Spain, watching the birdwatchers was as interesting as watching the birds.
IT has been another week of lovely weather. Bluebells carpet the woodland floor, primroses burst into colour on the ditches, and the butterflies are flying again.
WE return to Ireland to find the weather as sunny as that which we enjoyed on the Mediterranean during our recent visit.
AS we walked across the north Ibiza landscape, it was 29°C and even the lizards were seeking the shade.
DISPATCHES, via text messages to this relatively remote Mediterranean island which I am re-visiting, assure me that the young heron which we adopted a fortnight ago is alive, robust and growing in all directions.
IT is four weeks since we read that the first swallow had been sighted — nevertheless, it’s always a thrill and a reassurance to see them once again splitting one’s local skies.
I HAVE A friend in Tokyo who says she’s unworried by the regular aftershocks.
THE weather has been so sunny in the week since we’ve arrived back from the Canary Islands that we could top up our suntans, had we nothing else to do.
THE advances in nature in Ireland during our 30-day absence are striking but it is that time of year when, almost overnight, buds open and the bush which, yesterday, was bare branches, suddenly wears a shawl of green.
SIX weeks ago, on January 16., an 84-year-old Englishman set out on a raft, built here in La Gomera in the Canary Islands, to drift 2,800 miles across the Atlantic to Eleuthera Island in Bahamas, tracing the route upon which a ship’s 18-foot long jolly boat carried the survivors of the 41 crew of an English cargo vessel sunk by a German ship disguised as a merchantman (but then drawing back the deck-cowlings to reveal cannons and machine guns) during World War 11.
IT ISN’T all blue skies in the Canary Islands.
THRUSHES, blackbirds and small finches patrol the field beyond our garden from dawn to dusk.
I WILL miss life at the feeder when I travel abroad to hide away and finish a book about west Cork.
AFTER a week of deluges the days are brightened with a yellow sun and at night the stars glitter in a clear sky.
BY far the shortest way for me to reach Cork city from my idyllic West Cork redoubt is via the road from Timoleague to Bandon.
THE bird programmes on television are often fascinating with stories of twitchers in obsessive pursuit of rarities or dedicated birders working out how many caterpillars tits eat per day, or how may eggs a cuckoo lays and where.
HEAVENLY, is a word that springs to mind as I walk along the bay-side path on New Year’s morning.
A friend on mine, Kevin Hanley who, appropriately, sports a long, white beard, told me that some weeks ago when he was walking his dogs in Reen Wood near Castletownshend, west Cork, he came upon four of the mysterious ‘fairy houses’ as reported in the Irish Examiner.
AS I eye the copious vittles being prepared for Christmas, I remember reading that our jaw muscles are much weaker than those of our ancestors.
WHEN I saw it, I found it hard to believe my eyes, an area the size of two football pitches covered in ice on Courtmacsherry Bay in west Cork.
AT Christmas, one finds time to walk and take the air and, perhaps, time to sit at home and read a book.
TEAL are such pretty little ducks — hardly as big as a wood pigeon — it’s sad to think of them stuffed inside a widgeon which is stuffed inside a mallard which is stuffed inside a goose, and the lot then put in the oven and roasted.
IN Galway recently, I looked out the window of a seafront apartment one morning and saw five glossy blackbirds perched on a leafless shrub.
IT would seem a small thing to be concerned about, with the country in the state it’s in, but a beautiful butterfly which has been peacefully sleeping in my workroom for two months has suddenly woken up and now, on this bright, frosty morning, is beating its wings against my window, wanting to get out.
THE inner section of Dun Aengus Dock, in Galway city centre, was often as packed as a giant sardine tin with sprat and mackerel during the last two weeks of October.
AS I set out, intent upon a 40-minute hike to shake the cobwebs off and reduce the corporation, the day seemed set fair – but then, to use, oppositely, the words of Dylan Thomas’s Poem in October, “The weather turned around/ It turned away from the blithe country ...” and the sky was sudden stained as blue as a bruised damson when a squall swept in off the sea.
“LAZY autumn days in all their glory...” was a line of a song I heard as a youth.
WHETHER to genetically modify (GM) food sources or not is one of the most serious decisions mankind has ever had to take.
FOR 40 years I have picked forest mushrooms every autumn and winter, but I have never seen the abundance of perfect Boletus edulis, the king of mushrooms, that I encountered this year. I didn’t find them myself.
IT IS hard to imagine how anyone with a little foresight could ever starve in Slovenia, in south-central Europe, where I spent the last week.
TWO new, outstanding nature books from Gill & Macmillan arrived in the post this week.
THE birds are back in the garden, not that they were ever gone.
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.
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.
THE cold weather has had a big impact on the bird life where I live.
THE TALK in the pub was all about birds and everybody, nature watchers and gunmen alike had sympathy with the Redwings.
I WAS told there were crocs, but only after I’d been swimming.
THE first night in this tropical land of The Gambia in West Africa we ate in the company of hundreds of white butterflies.
OUTSIDE my window, the sky is suddenly blue, the sun catches the drops on the clothes-line carousel, gleams like silver on the ivy on the south side of the beeches and sets – as it were – the remaining beech leaves, low on the trees and scattered over the yard, on fire.
THE other morning, walking the scoured sands of Courtmacsherry Bay after the storm, I came upon many full, fat cockles.
WE call the little stream that runs alongside our garden Abhainn Éasca because one day, some years ago, I turned over a stone and found a twelve-inch long black eel.
LAST week the first storm of winter in this part of the world, with the huge gunnera leaves in the garden almost flying off their stalks – they need controlling anyway – and things going bang in the night.
WHEN the sun came out, half a dozen butterflies fluttered in the garden.
Dreoilín, dreoilín where is your nest?
It’s in the bush that I love best,
Behind the holly and ivy tree,
Where all the birds shall follow me.
IT’S amazing how smaltz songs can contain memorable lines, phrases that never leave one, no matter how saccharine or sentimental.
LAST week, in glorious weather, we walked the headlands of west Cork. On Three Castles Head, beyond Barley Cove, we found lizards basking on the walls of the collapsed 15th century bawn, golden lizards, sharp-eyed and fast, disappearing between the stones at the hint of a footfall or shadow.
A LOVELY morning to wake to – for a change. Outside, the sun is lighting the garden like a stage set.
THE other evening, venturing forth after the deluges, I walked out of a meadow into the half-darkness of an old beech wood.
MACKEREL galore again this year and our eastern European migrant workers are gobsmacked at the fecundity of the local seas as they reel them in off the pier and off the rocks without even the need of a boat to go after them.
WHEN the sun shines, the buddleia bush in the garden is a dazzling kaleidoscope of colour with half a dozen varieties of butterflies coming and going to the purple flowers.
Twenty-five degrees, read the dashboard thermometer as we drove west out of the city – what a day, of all days in this dysfunctional summer, to have had to spend indoors.
THE bounty of the mackerel arrived off the coast this summer, as every summer, and were shoaling in the bay during the Women’s Angling Competition at the Courtmacsherry Festival last week.
THREE cheers for the farmer I saw pulling ragwort in a sloping field, just south-west of Bandon.
AS OUTDOOR folk and country motorists will have noticed, the density of wild flowers this summer is exceptional.
“DO I dare to eat a peach?” J Alfred Prufrock, the sad anti-hero of TS Eliot’s eponymous love song asked himself in his old age. I recently dared to eat an Irish-grown peach in a Kinsale garden, and very fine and sweet it was, too, every bit as juicy as the peaches my brother grows in Spain.
AT this time of year, watching birds at the feeder is never more fascinating as parents troop out their offspring and teach them the location of a free lunch.
IN the comics we read as kids, nutty-looking English uncles with round glasses and straw hats followed by rosy-cheeked Enid Blyton or Famous Five children, all with butterfly nets, were figures of fun for us Irish boys.
Something terrible is happening to the waters around the coast of Ireland.
CLOUDS of butterflies and a haze of day-flying moths rose from beneath our feet as we walked the Seven Heads in west Cork on the glorious last day of May 2009.
My youngest son, currently teaching in Spain, had the good fortune to be invited to a lammergeyer-watching weekend in the Pyrenees.
WE’VE had bats around our house for years – pipistrelles, the smallest of Irish bats – and on these early summer nights we see them regularly.
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind…” so sang Bob Dylan in the enigmatic verses of his lyric on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, an album released in May, 1963.
LATE April in Ireland and the woods are carpeted in bluebells, a sight to behold.
MANY readers of this column will have holidayed in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and will know this extraordinary island much better than I.
IT is wonderful how nature adapts and turns opportunity to advantage.
IT IS early April and the train from Budejovice in the Czech Republic to Linz in Austria takes us through a wintry countryside, not a wild flower, weed or blade of new grass yet to be seen.
I REGRET to say that I cannot tell my readers much about Irish bird activity this week other than what I can see in my garden or from the windows of the car parked alongside the bay.
We arrive back in time for the spring and the St Patrick’s Day parade at Courtmacsherry, a very special event indeed, attended by hundreds with great effort put into costumes and bands.
IN the “casas particulares”, the private houses at which we stayed in various towns in Cuba, we never encountered fleas and only once did we see a cockroach.
Damien Enright visits a friendly haven of resplendent nature
THERE is a conspicuous absence of insects, other than gorgeous butterflies, around our idyllic temporary home, at Pon de Rock, Fort Charles Bay, Jamaica, although, according to the information pack supplied by our hostess, scorpions are abroad in the garden at night and one should wear shoes.
I WROTE last week about standing at the foot of an old wood, near Timoleague, one bright morning, watching flights of dunlin over the bay.
A TIGHT formation of dunlin rockets down the channel towards me, turns and disappears into thin air. Five seconds later and fifty metres away, they reappear as a sudden blink of light before turning and disappearing again.
ON the morning last week when a whale came up the bay, I found four missed calls on my telephone at 10am.
THE Seven Heads ranks amongst the most scenic, least spoiled areas of coastal west Cork.
SURELY everyone who has a child in the house should have a book on the natural history of Ireland if they can afford it.
Damien Enright on why we need to reinforce a vital law.
FIRE in the briars as bright as fires in the gorse in late summer.
Damien Enright on options for the weed growing in bays.
Damien Enright on late hatchlings that can’t make migration.
Damien Enright hails the teeming markets of Morocco
Damien Enright on bird-watching and massaging hedgehogs.
Damien Enright hears alarm bells ringing for fish stocks.
Damien Enright on a race against time with crab bounty.
Damien Enright takes aim at Palin’s moose-killing boasts
NOT TO belabour the pun but it can be said, in this summer of 2008, that the elements are an element of every conversation.
Damien Enright and family get stuck into the lovely limpet.
Damien Enright suggests we slow down and enjoy life.
Damien Enright reports further on our lack of insects.
LAST year, when I wrote that wild mushrooms in my part of Ireland seemed to be as rare as hen’s teeth, a German gentleman (and he turned out to be, indeed, a gentleman) wrote to tell me this was not the case at all. At least not in Kerry, and he could show me various wild fungi growing in profusion — but, on second thoughts, he wouldn’t.
Damien Enright says the decline of the bee may spell the end of our survival
Damien Enright visits the Tatra mountains in Slovakia
WHAT we laughably call our garden is so overgrown with every kind of ‘weed’, from ragged robin to red campion to tutsan and sanicle, all in flower, that it must be home to countless creatures such as shrews, wood mice, hedgehogs and stoats.
Damien Enright describes his summer garden’s residents
Damien Enright enjoys a new book on a famed Cork region.
MAY the Lord protect us from jet skis, and from loudmouths with mobile phones in planes.
SPRING may be here, and no real need to feed the birds, but the sight of a new species at the bird table sends me to buy another bag of peanuts, whatever the expense. Long-tailed tits are almost unheard of at bird feeders and so pretty and entertaining that I want to keep them coming. There’s a possessiveness to it — people with garden bird tables will know what I mean.
Damien Enright on how borders are non-existent for birds.
ON the second day of last week’s storms and spring tides, I walked down the long, sandy beach that stretches away from the village of Courtmacsherry, in west Cork.
Damien Enright says ‘facts’ on both sides are inconclusive
THIS morning, dawdling knee-deep in the water at the edge of the port beach at Valle Gran Rey on the Canary Island of La Gomera, I remembered standing in the same spot many years ago with a skinny boy, now a giant of 30 years, and looking at a big manta ray lying in the sand at our feet.
THE intention on the Saturday afternoon, our second day back on the island, was simply to sample our friend’s 2007 wine, stay a few hours and then go back down to the sea, the banana plantations and the black sand beaches.
Damien Enright says sunshine brings out best in nature.
Damien Enright says the world of nature has been knocked out of kilter.
DURING this year’s rainy season, temperatures have been soaring to 12 degrees at midnight in west Cork.
IS it to be another invasion of egrets, this time the cattle egret, a small, white heron, not quite as pretty as its cousin, the now familiar little egret, but pretty nonetheless?
IT IS to be hoped the threatened Canarian giant lizards will not fall victim to the likes of Jereme James, charged with smuggling three endangered iguana into the USA using his false leg.
Damien Enright contemplates a few of the wonders we are set to eradicate
AS WE enter the new year, the news from Bali isn’t as good as we hoped but it’s better than no news at all. Buying carbon credits, etc, may be a way to go, but I wonder if it’s not a bit of a cop-out after all.
Damien Enright recalls a strange affair between volunteer and pelican.
ACROSS the stream, in a big field which, unfortunately, fills more full with Japanese knotweed and ragwort every year, we regularly see a man taking his children, a small terrier and a black-and-white cat for a walk.
WHAT a privilege it is to be able to walk the countryside on these dazzling mornings when the storm has passed and see fields shining in the sun, each grass blade sparkling as if it was tipped with diamonds.
FOR the weekend birder, the peripatetic birder (the travelling salesman, say) or the twitcher, Finding Birds in Ireland, The Complete Guide, by Dempsey and O’Clery is the book to buy.
A READER writes to say that in Dublin a couple of climatically-disorientated street pigeons, uka (unkindly-known-as) rats-with-wings, recently decided to roost, nest and defecate on staff and visitors above the entrance of her office building.
HUGE excitement among the birding community and more ominous signs of climate change.
LAST week, we received a packet of sliced, dried culinary mushrooms from a Czech girl we know.
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