Everywhere I look, roses are in flower or in bud. Wild roses adorn the roadside ditches. Why they are called dog roses, I cannot guess; it sounds pejorative, as if they are inferior to garden roses. But they are so-called because in medieval times they were used in the treatment of rabies.
Field roses bloom on field ditches, burnet roses among the sand dunes and, usually near the sea, the now-common and naturalised Japanese roses with big, soft-petalled, short-lived flowers, which later produce shiny-red rosehips as large as crab apples.
On a bush in the garden, buds on a rose bush we took from our previous home open in flower heads as big as side plates and are so deep red in colour as to be almost black. It is an old bush. The parent plant, probably first sown in 1968, continues to flower robustly year after year, displaying its extravagant charms and dispensing its heady bouquet to honey bees, hoverflies, bumbles and butterflies, and any airborne insect that can be persuaded to drink of its nectar and carry its pollen elsewhere.
The latest visitor to the same garden is a young grey crow, which, along with the magpies, makes short work of our kitchen waste. It is gone minutes after we put it out. Scavenging birds are most useful; often we take fish bones or chicken waste down to the pier where the hungry gulls devour it with gusto. And what they miss falls in the sea and is, no doubt, gobbled by crabs.
A neighbour tells us about a pair of grey crows that nested near her home, high up on a ridge with magnificent views of the broad estuary beneath it, and the deep channels changing day to day as they are left by the retreating tide. During the May gales, these unfortunate crows twice had their nest blown away — one assumes they were young and inexperienced, otherwise they would not have built in so exposed a spot. On the third occasion, they were lucky. The nest held, the eggs were incubated and fledglings born. But then came a vicious storm and one chick was blown out of the nest — our neighbour spotted it in the field below and, even as she fretted about its future, was relieved to see that the parents were feeding it on the ground.
The following day, as she looked out her window, she saw a fox sloping along the field boundary, eyes fixed on the bird. It seemed about to make the killer-dash, when out of the sky came a parent crow followed by the other, both dive-bombing the would-be assassin, who quickly took to his heels, his tail between his legs. Lucky bird, hungry fox. But then, the fox could feast on the logan berries ripening in another neighbour’s garden; she tells me that foxes eat her soft fruit every year. Or it could come into our garden, and chase the pretty little bunnies, which now are soft and endearing, but will, no doubt, shortly mature into lettuce-eating machines.
Foxes should not eat our foundling heron. Last week, it disappeared one evening and did not return all the next day, or that night. At breakfast, my wife and I agreed that we had wanted it to return to nature when it could fare for itself — but now that it was gone, we missed it. It was a pleasant and elegant young bird and very much more interesting than, say, a canary or a chicken. Our principal concern was that it might have come to grief, attacked by a cat or a fox. However, an hour later, our fears were laid to rest when it winged in over the rooftops and landed in the yard.
While it has not repeated its 36-hour absence, it now leaves us for as much as 18 hours at a time and, because we have halved its rations, we are sure it must be feeding itself. While it still shows up daily for the free lunch, it is comforting to know that if we go away for days or weeks, it will not starve.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, June 20, 2011
