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.