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 guzzles down a fish or shellfish four times daily.
However, it knows when it has enough and stops clacking its beak for more. We had no alternative but to adopt it. The nest was in the canopy of a pine tree more than 100 feet above ground and there was nobody available to shin up the tree to replace it where it belonged.
Thus, we came to parent a heron. Now, however, while my wife and I are absent from west Cork in Formentera, it is residing in Galway city, with a sea view over the dock. Very appropriate for a heron. It is cared for by my son, taking time out from his studies to feed it, and my son’s girlfriend, a zoologist, who does the evening shift.
It is fledging quickly, and its wings will shortly be as capacious as a small umbrella. Upon our return to west Cork, we will resume parenting and will release it as soon as it can fly beyond the reach of cats. We hope it may return occasionally to visit our back garden, where it would make a lovely sight.
Meanwhile, I heard my first cuckoo of the year last week as we walked the dusty paths — half sandy earth, half bedrock — of ‘old’ Formentera, a small island south of Ibiza in the Balearics off the Spanish Mediterranean coast. I tried to follow it, but it was calling in dense woodland and I was reminded of the immortal Percy Bysshe Shelley line, ‘Oh, cuckoo, shall I call thee bird / Or but a wandering voice’.
I learned these lines at school, where my juvenile companions and I found it immensely amusing that a poet should go about addressing a cuckoo by any name whatsoever.
I say ‘old’ Formentera because much of it is new. The villages have changed beyond recognition. San Francisco Xavier used to be comprised of a huge, plain-faced church (no stained glass windows or Gothic fuss) standing at one side of an unpaved square, bockety with bedrock showing through the earth, and four houses ranged around. There are now streets upon streets, with mobile phone offices, boutiques, art galleries, restaurants and pavement-side cafes. There were no asphalt streets then, and only one road.
However, the countryside is still ‘old’ Formentera, and the walking is wonderful at this time of year, the fields green with crops of oats in the sandy south, red under the plough on the rich plateau in the north, and everywhere, except in the village streets, there are wildflowers of a dozen varieties.
The weather has been very kind, and we have swum off deserted pristine beaches.
The water is Ireland-in-July temperature — not quite as comforting as the sea off La Gomera in the Canary Islands, but invigorating, and one feels the better for a quick plunge and 10 minutes immersion, especially after an hour-long walk in temperatures of about 18C.
This is my first visit to Formentera for 46 years. I lived here once, for nine months, and visited the island many times for short stays during the years I lived in nearby Ibiza in the early 1960s. Back then, the women wore large sombreros with black headscarves underneath, and long black dresses to the ground which they tucked up when they worked in the fields, showing many-coloured petticoats beneath.
It is coincidental that I should be typing this in the same pension guesthouse — possibly the same room of the same pension — where I used to hear a typewriter clack in the night all those years ago.
This noise was made by shady ‘art’ dealer creating provenances for the fake paintings of Elmyr de Hory. This Ibiza resident was one of the most talented art forgers of all time, specialising in Impressionist paintings which were sold to galleries all over the world. Some still hang, deliberately or by default yet to be ‘unmasked’.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, April 11, 2011
