Strange summer sightings signal change

THE DAILY mantra of “occasional showers, some heavy’’ heard on the weather forecast most days in mid and late October turned out to be joined-up downpours, relieved only by brief intervals when clouds like lead barrage balloons lowered overhead, promising yet more rain.

Sun beams were as rare as diamonds in ploughed fields over much of the south west.

“It was all predicted — warm, dry summers and warmer, wetter winters. It’s called global warming, geddit?” my friend said.

However, it’s only late October, and who knows, the rain-sodden days may not continue. For instance, we had a bright, sunny day last week. The sky was blue, the breeze was sharp. I caught a cold. It was my own fault, standing around in shirtsleeves. When I was a boy, my mother would never have let us out without ganzies in late October.

“Will you ever get sense?” she’d ask me, if she was still here.

Here, on the south-west coast, we had, I think, 10 weeks without rain in the summer of 2006. The grass shrivelled on our lawn. The house plants that we have expelled to the garden, having grown too big for indoors — large yuccas and umbrella plants — gasped in their pots and had to be watered daily. They routinely survive outdoors in our mild Gulf Stream climate, and now, even in winter, put on new leaves.

Meanwhile, the phenomena of this summer may also soon become routine. Foremost, must be the stranding of buoy barnacles. They came ashore in their millions on storm beaches from Malin to Mizen. Most people who found them had never seen them before, so we can take it something unusual had happened on the surface of the sea, where they spend their lives in clumps attached to the ‘buoy’, a table-tennis-ball-size, white, polystyrene-like float which they make.

They are truly pelagic, drifting on the surface, their only home.

But this summer, alive but dying, they littered the strands and, indeed, some people complained of the stink, so many desiccated and rotting barnacles were there. When the carcasses had finally dispersed on the tides, their delicate shells crunched beneath one’s feet. Sand hoppers on a coastal road in their millions, one high tide night; the retired fisherman who told me this has, all his life, lived alongside the sea and driven that seaside road ten thousand times. He had never seen the like, he said. So, another phenomenon.

A reader reported brittle stars, by their hundreds, washed ashore on a Donegal beach, and ordinary pink starfish invaded a beach in West Cork. Ospreys — fish hawks — arrived in Castletownshend Bay, also in West Cork, one bird first and, a week later, another; it is likely they were young birds moving south from Scotland. There were many fewer terns on some bays in the south-west and periods when sand eels were unusually scarce. Many guillemot starved; I found corpses on two beaches.

A young man studying ecology at UCC told me he’d found a huge number of razor shells on the north side of our local bay — why razorfish should abandon their shells en mass is a mystery. A reader wrote to tell me she and a friend had found a Maybug — also known as a cockchafer — buzzing about in September. As the name implies, they are normally flying in May. A hen pheasant with four small bundles of fluff in tow walked in front of her car at Glendalough a few days later. Who ever heard of pheasants hatching in September? I found a dead vole on a road near Bandon. It was very squashed, and appeared to have been eating blackberries. Field vole in blackberry sauce was being enjoyed by a pair of grey crows that took to the trees as I approached.

As the south westerlies commenced to blow, bird nerds, God bless them, swept the sky with their binoculars and added to the list of rare vagrants to Ireland. The first-ever Canadian Warbler in Europe was twitched at Loop Head, a Baltimore Oriole from the USA at Cape Clear, near Baltimore, Ireland, and an American Blackpoll Warbler on Dursey Island. Eastern birds like an Isabelline Shrike from Kazakhstan was seen on the Old Head of Kinsale and — “Direct from Siberia and points east!” — Yellow browed Warblers and a Red breasted Flycatcher at Crookhaven.

Go to Latest Rarity Photos October 2006 at www.birdsireland.com for fine pictures of these.

A birder friend was annoyed that he couldn’t be everywhere. It reminded me of the Irish MP Sir Boyle Roche’s comment to the English parliament in the late 18th century, “Gentlemen, I am not a bird, I cannot be in two places at once.” Clearly, it’s still impossible, even today.