Elephants communicate on their own frequency

I WAS obliged to leave our perch in the Sierra Nevada in south-east Spain and return to Ireland again for the pleasure of family celebration and the onus of family business.

Travelling the skies does not rest easy with me in these climate-crisis days. I pay my carbon offsets for each air mile but really I should be The Man in Seat 61, using railways to get me around the world. Trains are one of the least environmentally damaging and most pleasant ways to travel.

The brilliant website — www.seat61.com — provides timetables and fares for trains to almost anywhere. But, meanwhile, what a time to celebrate being at home! When the sun shines on Ireland, it leaves Spain in the shade.

Bushes in flower and birds singing on them. Flowers by the roadside, flowers in the meadows and flowers in the woods. White blackthorn, yellow gorse, pink flowering currant, sunny celandine, the white bells of wild garlic, primroses like rich cream, violets and bluebells. Dawn chorus each morning and pheasants calling. Blackbirds and thrushes carolling above the yard at midday, pigeons burbling from the high trees in the evening. Rabbits scampering with testosterone-fuelled intent in the fields, unfortunate foxes flattened on the road, an otter in the river, snow-white egrets reflected in a dark pond. To paraphrase Yeats, now that the seasons shift and the halcyon days arrive early:

“Fish, flesh or fowl commend all springtime long,Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.Caught in this sensual music all neglectMonuments of unageing intellect ...”

This dry spell is, of course, phenomenal. No rain since St Patrick’s Day. However, as far as I can see, the calendar of wild flowers remains more or less the same, with the exception of celandine, which seems to be still in great vigour, given that it begins flowering in January and is usually past its best by now.

I was taken with the story of the two unfortunate elephants that almost drowned in mud at Youghal. I had it from the mouth of the vet who attended the scene. He phoned a colleague in Leipzig to ask what was the appropriate tranquilliser dosage to calm down the animals and was staggered at the huge dosage required. When asked how he would plunge a needle into their thick hide, he said, “I have a strong arm!”.

In the event, there was no need for injections: their trainer said they would be best left to recover naturally and, indeed, they were heard, an hour later, in their caravan, to be making low-pitch sounds of contentment. My friend tells me that, in nature, such low frequency elephant songs can carry many miles across the savannah to reach other elephant ears, somewhat in the manner that whales, communicating over vast oceanic distances, broadcast in frequencies we do not hear.

As readers of this newspaper will know, on Wednesday, April 4, the two unfortunate circus elephants went wandering out of their enclosure and one fell into a quagmire so deep that it was engulfed. The second went to its rescue, reaching out its trunk to drag its companion back to solid ground but instead it, too, slipped into the ditch. But for their trunks raised above the surface and allowing them to breathe, they both would have drowned.

The Fire Brigade was summoned, the vet was summoned and a great crowd of sympathisers turned up to watch the gallant efforts of a JCB driver, directed by the acting fire chief, to pull them out, one at a time, by attaching large slings around their necks.

First rescued was the younger, smaller animal, no easy matter, the natural suction of the mud and its sheer weight (four tons) almost besting the JCB. A Hi-Mac arrived to rescue the heavier, senior animal, 30-years-old, again a task requiring great expertise. When at last both were back on dry land, each caressed the other with its trunk. What a wonderful episode for “A Day in the Life of A Vet” TV docu-drama.

Had a satellite picture been spun into space and TV watchers in India or Indonesia seen it, they could be forgiven for thinking that global warning was well advanced in Ireland and that we have elephants roaming the bogs. Not so. Elephants are rarely seen here, unless they are pink.

My veterinarian friend told me that he was amazed at the animals’ strength, given the viscosity of the mud. While an 800kg bull fallen into a slurry tank could hardly move a foot in the mire, these elephants could plunge their own length, their foreheads barely clearing the surface.