Birds trekking south herald autumn

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.

He and his wife were sitting on the beach at St Helen’s Bay, Co Wexford, soaking up the last September sun (they got burnt) when they noticed fat swallows arriving singly or in pairs and flying back and forth over the sheltered waters until a half dozen or so assembled.

Then, as one, “chattering and flying so close to one another you’d swear they were talking,” they set off towards the Tuskar Rock lighthouse, flying low at first, then climbing steadily, up and up, until at last they were so high that they were lost even to the view of my friend’s powerful Zeiss binoculars.

Sometimes, a single bird would arrive in the bay, and having waited ten minutes and finding no companion, would set off alone towards the horizon.

It, too, would climb higher and higher until it was a dot in the vast sky and then lost from sight completely.

“To see it set off on its own, so tiny a bird on such a long journey, brought a lump to my throat ...” my friend said.

In front of their rented cottage, overlooking the Saltee Islands, cows were dropping calves, licking the new-born offspring until, in time, they rose on their spindly legs, and shook, and settled down again to feed from the bulging udders of their mothers. After 24 hours, the farmer would come and take them away, never again to see their loving mammies. While they would drink “formula,” the fine, rich milk destined for them would go to us humans — who are told we shouldn’t drink too much milk, after all.

“Didn’t that bring a lump to your throat?” I asked him. “No,” he said; no anthropomorphic sentimentalist, my pal. But the sight of a unique moment of natural history, the swallows setting off on their 2000-mile flight to south of the sun truly moved him. As one whose imagination has long been engaged by the epic journeys made by small birds, I am not surprised.

I enjoyed the autumn sun myself, stopping to lean on a six-bar gate and look out over the green-blue sea to the Old Head of Kinsale, listening to the hum of bees in the fuchsia and the song of a farmland robin which, overtaken by curiosity, landed on a nearby bush to watch me, a lone human in a place where few humans pass. Sometimes, small, high clouds cast shadows on the ocean, which otherwise was the colour of turquoise.

These bright autumn days are some of the most beautiful of the year.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!”, indeed, as Keats said.

The sea is full of six-inch long mackerel, riffling the surface like shee-gaoites, the ‘fairy winds’ that throw haystacks or stooks aloft as they pass. Spawned this year, how fast they have grown! Immature, though they are, I have no qualms about savouring them when they are caught on rod and line. Meanwhile, on land, the hedgerows are burgeoning with berries. On a train coming down from Dublin, I noticed that half the fields of Laois and Tipperary were red-rimmed with haws.

And, as for the mist, on a recent morning, I watched dawn break, an unusual experience for me. Once I used to see it regularly, on my way home from all-night parties, but one can’t keep doing the same old thing year after year. I watched this particular dawn from a high window in my home. It was awesome, for the late-sleeper, to see the awakening of the world.

Beyond the trees below me lay the bay — grey water, the other side a mile or so away — and the ghostly shape of a finger of land coming down to meet it, with a single Scots pine stark against the barely discernible ridge of hills far beyond, like in a Chinese picture.

Then, before my eyes, green rose through the grey, the green of fields on the grey negative of the land, like colour emerging on a photographic plate and then, below the green, the misty browns of the shoreline came through, and finally a single house, yellow perhaps, gaining shape in the light, like watching a painting grow on the grey canvas of the morning, or the world being born.

It took only a few minutes. Later, the colours strengthened, shapes hardened, edges formed. What I saw was the inception, the first wisps of colour touching the awakening land.