WINTER reveals what was hidden all summer. Three nests in the garden, visible from my workroom window.

WE SAW An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore film on global warming, showing for five nights only at a cinema in Clonakilty, a trendy town with health food shops, gourmet shops, a country market, a holistic healing centre offering naturopathy, aquapuncture, homeopathy etc, a music school, bookshops and many well-educated people pursuing the good life in West Cork.

WHAT with trying to find the right wood-burning boiler to heat my house and engage a tree doctor who could wield a chain saw with the finesse of a brain surgeon, my mind was full of sawdust and two short planks all week.

GOVERNMENT policy of carbon emission charges is great news for the big-time polluters, according to Friends of the Earth (FOE), but not such good news for the PAYE citizens that will pay the price.

THE DAILY mantra of “occasional showers, some heavy’’ heard on the weather forecast most days in mid and late October turned out to be joined-up downpours, relieved only by brief intervals when clouds like lead barrage balloons lowered overhead, promising yet more rain.

IS IT global warming? In these middle weeks of October, we have had fruit flies everywhere about the house, and even mosquitoes here and there.

I RECEIVED an attractive book, Irish Wild Plants: Myths, Legends, Folklore by Niall MacCoitir from Collins Press last week.

IT BROUGHT a lump to my throat ...” my friend, a very expert and usually unsentimental bird watcher told me, as he recounted seeing swallows heading out over the sea at the start of their long trek to South Africa.

A BLACKBIRD can easily teach its young to scratch amongst fallen leaves and uncover grubs and insects; I’ve watched such lessons from kperegrinemy work-room window, the student standing close to the teacher, watching the process intently and waiting for succulent morsels to be popped into its bill.

AT NIGHT, the sea in La Gomera moaned and spoke with many voices. We could hear it from our house amongst the bananas, as we lay sweating on our sheets.