Damien Enright: The come-and-go of nature is joyous and tragic but the decline in many species is ominous

Sea pinks are blooming on Irish coasts at the moment

It's been great, writing a weekly column for 31 years for the Irish Examiner. Thirty-one years tenure is no big deal — Michael Viney in the Irish Times has been writing his far more distinguished column for far longer. 

Lately, I read that, as of January 2020, one Sid Hartman of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, USA, had been writing his weekly sports column for 74 years and was continuing to do so even as he approached his 100th birthday.

Damien Enright

In the thumbnail photo that has headed my column, I haven't changed for, perhaps, 20 years. Readers, I imagine, skip down to the text where I try to report the changes of the week or season:

• the wood anemones, first in the woods ahead of the bluebells;
• ramsons and invasive wild garlic;
• the arrival of migrants, sand-martins before the swallows, swifts the latest to arrive, sprats before the mackerel;
• the post-chick-rearing departures of shelduck in July, leaving their duckling in the care of 'creche-mothers' while the flock flits off to Heligoland to moult and preen their new, gorgeous feathers amongst thousands of others before returning to parental duties in late August. 

The come-and-go of nature, in my time writing for this paper, has been joyous and tragic. The decline in many species has been ominous and doesn't bode well for our grandchildren. Still, as Tennyson's Ulysses says: "Tho' much is taken, much abides..."

However, last week's UN Report on Climate Change would make one break out in a sweat or put shivers up one's spine. We can only have faith that humanity will get a grip and save the planet before it expires.

I never planned to be a newspaper columnist. Returning to Ireland in 1989 after 30 years overseas, I settled in West Cork. One day, I spotted an old shop in Timoleague with Munster and Leinster Bank emblazoned in gold lettering on the window — probably the last such window in Ireland — and snapped my father, then aged 85, beside it. 

He told me that as the accountant at the M&B in Clonakilty in the 1940s, he'd managed the weekly sub-office held within. Intrigued, I wrote up the story in 500 words and then decided to post it off, with the photo, to the Cork Examiner. I asked no fee and applying for a job never crossed my mind. 

However, next day, 'out of the blue', Sean Dunne, then the Examiner's literary editor, phoned to ask me would I like to submit an occasional column. I suggested natural history, a lifelong interest, as a theme.

The columns 'worked' and garnered a readership. Subsequently, I had the distinction of being the paper's sole natural history columnist for a decade. I then had the idea that a page devoted to nature writing would be popular and suggested it to the editor. This was the genesis of the present page.

A Place Near Heaven and The Kindness of Place, by Damien Enright

In my books, A Place Near Heaven and The Kindness of Place, published by Gill & Macmillan, I acknowledged pieces from the columns as the source: "The following pages are extracts from my Irish Examiner newspaper columns, my walk books of West Cork and other writings. They owe everything to the late Seán Dunne, poet and editor, who first suggested I set down a calendar of these precious West Cork days."

Now, at home or abroad, I'll miss the habit of making notes of things I see for the next week's column. Last weekend, it was the abundance of cuckoo flowers, flag irises and sea pinks on Heir Island. 

There, on the pier, a nice man who was already giving a lady a lift asked me where we were headed. When I said we were walking to Paris, he said it was a hilly road and would we like to hop in. I availed of the kind offer. As we set off, he asked me my name and I was complimented when both he and the nice lady said they knew me from the Examiner and were pleased to meet me.

I've made many friends through the column, too numerous to mention. I thank them all for their patronage and am pleased when they say I never bored them once.