In contrast to floods in Ireland, this island of La Gomera in the Canaries now suffers a worrying deprivation of rain and an increasing occurrence of ‘calimas'

The farmer who dropped by to give unasked-for advice to my friend and his wife clearing their newly bought quarter of an acre of long, abandoned terraces on a steep slope on the island of La Gomera in the Canaries was unequivocal: “Cut it down!”

A Courtmacsherry neighbour, Kathy Gannon tells me that when the tide is out, the vast acres of clean, grey mud of the bay reflect the sun in splendour in the clear, sharp air.

FIFTY seven Canada geese at Coolmain Strand and 47 Canarian ravens touring the sky above the blunted peak of the long- extinct volcano of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands — Garajonay, the volcano is called, for a pair of doomed lovers, Gara and Jonay, she the Gomera Guanche princess, who fell in love with the peasant boy, Jonay, from the island of Tenerife, 50km across the water, which he swam to reach her.

The other evening I saw a Donegal woman on TV demonstrate the slicing and cooking of squid for a TV chef.

As landlords’ enclosures of villages and commonages during England’s industrial revolution drove landless countrymen into the maws of the poet William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills”, a romantic nostalgia for the countryside began to grow.

I'm intrigued that edible dormice may share this very barn, my son’s workshop in South Bohemia in the Czech Republic, where I have temporarily set up a desk.

"Sea lions literally everywhere, you’ve to be careful not to step on them, marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, sea turtles.”

When we arrived home in west Cork on this day last week, it was 3am Monday morning.

I lived near Ibiza’s national park and I didn’t even know it

IT’S A beautiful day and we look out on a bay full of ferries coming and going and honking and hooting and waking us up earlier than we usually wake: they are going to Barcelona, to Valencia, to the next door small island of Formentera and to Talamanca, a beach across Ibiza Bay, writes Damien Enright.

Damien Enright visited Ibiza to discuss a book he has written about the time he spent there between 1961 and 1965

It’s a great year for mushroom, both field and forest, writes Damien Enright.

I’M in Czechia, the new and less cumbersome English name for the Czech Republic, writing this in a caravan in the shade of a Scots pine on my son’s half acre of recreation land in the ‘moldavite belt’ of Lower Bohemia, north of the Sumava National Park and the Austrian border.

A heated meeting of residents in Skibbereen on July 19 reflected their anxieties about the hazards they fear if a plastics factory manufacturing ‘nurdles’ — polymer pellets — is built in the town.

This morning I saw a buzzard drifting across the blue sky above my home in West Cork and marvelled at how gracefully and effortlessly it was carried on the upper air.

A visit to old friends in their remote farmhouse in south Sligo was like a foreign holiday, says Damien Enright.

One of the best short videos of a humpback whale leaping vertically, full body, out of the sea was taken just outside Courtmacsherry Bay by a visitor aboard Mark Gannon’s angling boat.

Buzzards are returnees. Extinct in the late 1800s, they slowly began recolonisation in the 1930s, writes Damien Enright

The temperature gauge in the Go Bus reads 21°C at 5pm as we are driven from Dublin Airport down the quays and along the Liffey to pick up more passengers for the three and half hour drive to Cork.

The owners of Rocinante, a 17m long ketch, asking price €50,000, are a rum crew, with a story behind them, writes Damien Enright.

Skinks catching the sun might be mistaken for dribbles of gold escaped from a smelter. Glossy black skins peppered with gold spots, they are strange creatures, neither lizard nor snake, somewhere in between.

In West Cork, it was as warm as the Canary Islands if one was in a sheltered corner or a stoutly built conservatory.

The ravens have built their nest at their traditional site at Coomalacha, on the Seven Heads in West Cork, as they do every year. I’m glad to hear this, writes Damien Enright.

My column of February 26 explained that a unique charm of the Valle Gran Rey on the island of La Gomera in the Canaries is the laid-back “vibe” left over from the first hippies that arrived here, Vietnam War draft dodgers in the late 1950s.

The beauty of west Cork under snow is a rare and lovely sight, writes Damien Enright

La Gomera offers a uniquely different ‘vibe’ from other Canary islands in one important respect. Apart from its unique cloud forests, unspoiled beaches, walking paths and absence of glitzy resorts, a distinctive laid back feeling abides, writes Damien Enright

The Valle Gran in La Gomera in the Canary Islands is much the same as ever, writes Damien Enright

I was chuffed (that’s not ‘choughed’, now, and birds are few in this column) to hear the virtues of voles much lauded on the Living the Wildlife RTÉ 1 programme on Tuesday last week, writes Damien Enright.

The number of winged insects in Germany has fallen by 75% over the last 27 years, writes Damien Enright. 

IN Timoleague, west Cork, where the famous 13th century abbey overlooks the sea, there may be seen, these evenings, one of the most extraordinary displays of coordination and swarm behaviour in nature, a murmuration of starlings, says Damien Enright.

My friends, the local crustacean fishermen of West Cork’s Seven Heads, have still received no help from the Department of the Marine in replacing equipment lost during Storm Ophelia, writes Damien Enright.

Up to 20,000 Cory’s Shearwaters, oceanic birds with 1.25m wingspans, were breed on the Selvagem Islands, 280 km south of Madeira. Big, meaty birds, the squabs were traditionally harvested and salted for food. Monks on Skellig Michael similarly harvested gannet squabs from Small Skellig, writes Damien Enright