Gorse’s golden rule no longer holds

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.

Michael O’Brien was referring to the effect of the unusually sunny weather and to an old saying I’d retailed in my book, A Place Near Heaven, which noted that “kissing’s out of season when gorse is out of bloom”. Country people know that there is always a sprig of gorse in flower somewhere, in all months of the year, so there is no danger of a closed season on canoodling.

A characteristic of French gorse is that, while it has a main flowering season in May, individual bushes flower all year. Indeed, I’ve noticed on winter walks when we’re caught on windswept headlands with stair rods of rain bucketing down, that there’s always the odd, optimistic bottlebrush of yellow gorse to light the dismal ditches before we abandon hope and race for the pub.

Now, in this most glorious of summers, I was surprised to hear that not a single furze bush bore flowers. I went to look. From the gorse-bedecked slopes of the hills beyond Dunmanway to the shoulders of the Seven Heads, there wasn’t a solitary blossom, let alone a flowering bush, to be seen. As my informant had said, small, dark pods had everywhere replaced the flowers and it might be that the continuous high temperatures have caused all the bushes to go to seed at once. Thus, if the old saying, representing centuries of observation, is anything to go by, here again we have evidence that a timeless order has changed. Global warming has altered the course of nature. The golden rule no longer holds.

During these sun-filled days, the wild buddleia at the end of our garden attracts swarms of butterflies.

Almost every Irish species is there in their brightest colours — peacocks, admirals, tortoiseshells, fritillaries, painted ladies, large and small whites, speckled woods, meadow browns. They feast on the nectar, and there, by the small stream where everything is overgrown and cabbage palms, pheasant berries and giant gunnera vie for space, one might be in a corner of a jungle, seeking shade out of the heat of the sun.

On the warm evenings last week, the scene in our seaside village was Mediterranean. With the local festival in full swing, visitors flooded in. In the torrid nights, the buzz and music of the pubs poured onto the pavement, and the village street, lapped by the sea on one side, was crowded with a non-stop come-and-go of sun-bronzed holidaymakers, girls in skimpy dresses, matrons in daring décolletage, men in calf-length shorts. On it went, nightly, past midnight and into the early hours, with bonfires on the beach, and guitars.

A Dublin visitor described the “...milieu” (a French word to suit the scene) as “so Riviera that a yacht crew, pulling into the dock at night, might well think they had fetched up in a Mediterranean, not an Irish, port”. Yes, on the tables outside the pubs and hotel it was, of course, black stout and pale beer rather than white wine or cool pink Camparis — but if such summers become the norm, we will be sipping Clonakilty Chardonnay, Barryroe Beaujolais or a Macon from Macroom before long.

We found some full, ripe whortleberries on the ditches on the hills beyond Dunmanway, and delicious they were, especially when one ate half a handful at once. They are nearly past their season, but the blackberries are coming in and, what with the heat, there should soon be mushrooms in the fields.

I wrote some weeks ago about the long nurturing of young birds of prey and asked by what means does a peregrine falcon teach its chick how to stoop on a victim at up to 180mph? A friend tells me that one evening he was sitting on a beach at Broadstrand Bay, west of the Old Head of Kinsale, watching the ringed plover that make their nests in the shingle.

Suddenly, he heard a swish of air and a male peregrine, with a juvenile flying close behind it, stooped and effortlessly caught an unfortunate ring plover leading its clutch of chicks across the strand. As it rose, it passed the victim to its own chick, as a parent might pluck a blackberry and pass it to a child.

These days, peregrines regularly pass over the village, each parent with a juvenile flying close behind it, diving with it when it dives. And so it learns to emulate the ambush-stoop of the parent, descending on its victim like a missile from the sky.