Enjoying the sweet songs of spring

MUCH AS I appreciated the weather on our first weekend back in Ireland — the biting wind, the driving rain, the boggy fields — I would have to recommend to my compatriots and contemporaries a few winter months in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains, if only for the increased lung capacity that walking the local high altitude paths endows.

Following two months in those mountains, low West Cork hills that have previously taxed me are, since I returned, taken at a canter and while my breathing previously sounded like loud, out-of-tune bagpipes, it is now audible only to those a metre or less away.

Melodious rather than discordant, it no longer causes my companions to fear that my own Shank’s Mare may give out and that they will have to mount me on a litter and carry me, or tie me to an improvised travois.

What the Alpujarras farmer I met last week would have given for the deluges that fell on Ireland in our first week back! He told me that this year Andalucia was short a week of rain; six or seven days more would have filled the tanks and topped up the water table: without it, the crops would be vulnerable in the hot summer. Before I left the sierras, the days were increasingly sunny, the cold wind promising snow was felt no more and spring was clearly on the way.

At the high altitudes, spring is slower to come: the birds are slower to return, but when, later this week, I arrive back at our rented cottage below the snowy peaks, I hope to hear the first nightingales sing.

Now, here in Ireland, the birds are more visible than usual. They wander further afield, in search of mates and nesting sites, and there is, at yet, little leaf cover on the trees. Yesterday, we had a song thrush carolling from a sycamore behind our house at four in the afternoon; it was wonderful to hear, a mature thrush, with a mature song — love’s old sweet song, a sentimentalist might say.

But foremost, on the first mornings home, I noticed the mistle thrushes: ‘missile thrushes’ I should call them, for the rate at which they winged across the lawn to the high beeches beyond where, every year, they nest.

The first I saw flashed by so fast I thought it was a sparrowhawk. Later, one of the pair, sitting on a branch of cherry tree in our garden with its back to me, looked at least as big as a kestrel.

I was pleased to see that the ravens had nested, once again, at their traditional site over the sea. The nest, lined with horse hair, is a foot across, deep and cosy, a perfectly formed, high-sided bowl, protected from the prevailing south westerlies by a salient of rock to the sea side and with an overhang of rock above to protect it from the rain. Below, the sea surges or crashes into the narrow cove, depending on the weather.

Come what may, the eggs or fledglings will be snug and secure.

When I passed close to the cove the other afternoon, one bird, possibly the male, was standing in the cliff field nearby and it honked a series of deep, base alarm notes as I approached. Hearing these, the bird sitting on the nest bailed out and, as always, glided without a wing beat down over the sea and, staying low, rounded the cliff corner to rise over the lip a hundred yards along so that the nest site would not be betrayed.

It joined its mate in the grass, and they both stood, shining blue black, almost iridescent, in a few minutes of sunlight. Ravens are truly beautiful birds, the big, black beak like a shard of obsidian merging into the jet black of the head, different from the rooks, whose dirty white beaks look like pieces of bone plucked of feathers.

In the human environment, a woman from Cork complained bitterly that she and her husband could find no signposts whatsoever for Ireland’s second city after picking up a car at Dublin Airport. Trying to negotiate through or around the Dublin, they got lost three times.

Driving south from the city, at Portlaoise I’ve sometimes missed the badly-signposted ‘side’ road, the N8, to Cork and found myself on the ‘big’ road, the N7 to Limerick instead. The N7 also goes to Kerry and maybe cute Kerry businessmen arranged this, to catch tourists before they had spent half their money. I can hear American visitors say, “Hey, Lou, we’ve missed the Cork turn-off but this goes to Kerry. Let’s just hit Killarney and forget Cork!”

However, Cork folk aren’t bamboozled so easily, and Americans have less money to spend than we Irish, now.