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.
All winter, they hang out – if that’s the word – in a small, wooden, garden shed where they seem to live between the ceiling lining of black polythene and the tar-paper roof. They continue to reside there, despite the shed being lifted, swung on a gantry and relocated at least twice in the last few years.
They are site-faithful, like swallows. However, they are resident and don’t have to fly from South Africa, find Ireland, then find west Cork and, finally, the very stable they were born in. The in-built logic is that if they were safe in a nest upon its rafters, their offspring will be too. The swifts follow the same survival tactic; they find ruined Timoleague Abbey after a 6,000 mile flight. They are back again this year, I rejoice to say, skimming the rooftops of the village, hunting in packs, screaming as they go.
The bats stay with us winter-long and sometimes fly on warm days. Die Fledermaus, they call them in German and an operetta was named for them, these flying mice. Now, in May, we see them in the moonlight for a second, flitting over the garden and down the corridor of trees. I remember an old bank house in Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, where, on long summer evenings, dozens flew over the yard and we tried – bloodthirsty boys that we were – to knock them out of the sky with sliothars pucked with ferocious force. But divil-a-one did we ever hit, thank God, and the bats dodged, dived and pirouetted above our heads, regardless. How could they pitch and weave between the high-velocity sliothars we hurled across their flight paths.
Summer sees us settled back at home after our winter wanderings in Cuba, Jamaica and elsewhere. There is nowhere as conducive as Ireland when the weather is good. This May, we’ve had days when the sun shone so benevolently that my head got burnt when I went out walking. We’ve had gusty Atlantic days with the same sun coming and going and silver drops hanging amongst the fuchsia after showers.
According to the old calendar, Bealtaine begins the Irish summer. May, with its rough winds, clears away the debris, throws down the last dead leaves, cleans the world for the new. Then, everything grows, wildflowers burst from the earth and the trees put on leaves in millions.
The tonnage of vegetation that springs from the earth is surely an annual miracle revealed before our eyes.
I say "miracle". For all the science and explanations, we still do not know from whence, as Dylan Thomas put it, comes "The force through the green fuse drives the flower". Science explains it is a matter of light, of nutrients, of the urge for reproduction. And science deserves respect, for the great work it had done. But the planet must first turn to the light, must continue to spin in the cycle that brings heat and rain, that makes soil anew, that feeds the creatures that inhabit it and improve it, that puts up flowers for bees that pollinate, that moves the winds to move the seeds to colonise new pastures. All this seems a miracle to me.
At times, one can almost hear the growing and dying of the vegetable world which, if we let it, would colonise every human artifact in a few short years. My son brought back photos he’d taken of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, once the seat of a king of kings, its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces all covered now in vines and creepers, nature triumphant and outliving man.
Our staff and our sustenance is, of course, the green stuff that regenerates year upon year. It’s as well we can’t consume it all otherwise we’d surely eat ourselves into starvation, devouring the homes and sustenance of the very life forms that sustain us. The thankless creatures aerate the earth, pollinate the crops, re-seed degraded land and seed remote islands.
It’s no wonder Gandhi wouldn’t step on an ant.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, May 25, 2009
