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.

FIRST MORNING back from the ever-lovely island of La Gomera, in the Canaries, and it’s porridge with figs for breakfast; fresh figs purloined from a roadside tree as we drove across the island to catch the boat to Tenerife for our flight home.

TWO recent news items put me in mind of a book I read some years ago called In the Heart of The Sea.

OVER the small stream that borders our garden, the last purple cascades of buddleia are still laden with butterflies.

RAIN has been sparse and sporadic. On the country lanes, the hart’s tongue ferns are half dead.

ON bank-holiday Monday, a local songwriter/musician phoned me to say that the click-click of the gorse pods popping in the heat were like maracas in a salsa band, and that kissing was finally out of season in west Cork.