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”.