Season’s colour and music surround us

THE joys of spring 2007 go on and on.

The halcyon days seem never ending. Out on the coast, the sea is brilliant blue beneath a cloudless sky. Small boats are black silhouettes on the glittering water in the path of the sun. The land across the bay is green, white and gold, green fields above white beaches, and headlands golden with gorse. A froth of white blossom tops the blackthorn hedges. Hereabouts, this is the thirty-first day without rain.

For fear anyone who disagrees, I will concede that, one night, a light sprinkling, little more than a mist, visited us. You couldn’t call it rain. The farmers will be hurting shortly.

As I walk down the lane towards the sea, a horse in an orchard lies stretched in the sun. Above it, the apple trees are white with blossom.

Maybe it’s dreams are full of windfalls. Five swallows swoop and flick over a field of long grass, as if they are celebrating, not feeding: maybe they’ve just arrived on this blessed isle. Blessed, it is, indeed, in this weather.

Along the ditch, violets grow in profusion, glowing dark purple in the shade. The golden celandine, like small buttercups, are open wide, petals gleaming as if lacquered, whole mats of celandine. This is the flower that closes when clouds pass over. These days, it never closes.

In the raven’s nest over the sea are three fat young, almost as big and glossy as the parent birds that keep guard over them. As I approach, they honk in alarm to one another. The one standing by the nest (there is no longer room for it inside) flies off to stand on the cliff edge to the north, while its mate, if it isn’t away foraging, takes up position on the cliff side to the south. They honk to one another noisily. Once, only, a fledgling ‘chimed in’, a good description because its call indeed sounded like a bell note. I imagine young ravens are under orders to stay ‘sthum’ in the nest, like American Indian papooses were taught not to cry when the elders, for reasons of survival, required silence. How young birds can learn this tactic, I can’t imagine. They are free to call for food, when a parent brings it. But when the parent isn’t around, they rarely make a sound.

I am so glad to be back in Ireland to witness and enjoy this unique spring. Whatever the weather, the miracle of this season is that all nature is new — new leaves, all fresh and bright and tender, new flowerheads, new blossom, new birds. Once again, the beeches are coming into leaf and the first clumps of young oak leaves are lemon yellow against the blue sky. The hazel buds are opening. The sycamore is putting forth gorgeous brown-red leaves, on red stems.

In the woods, the ramsons are opening; white, starry flowers with a garlic-like smell — the other garlic flower, the triquetrous garlic, like a white bluebell, forms bands of white along the road verges where it thrives. Every day more and more bluebells open, the beginning of what will shortly be a purple haze. Male ferns and lady ferns put up new fronds.

Lords-and-Ladies push through the leaf mould beside the dappled paths, their leaves like small lilies.

On the estuary, terns, newly returned from south and west Africa, cruise back and forth thirty feet above the surface, swallow-like, with white and grey plumage, black caps, red beaks and deeply forked tails. They balance delicately in the air before plunge-diving on their prey.

The winter birds, godwits, knot, dunlin are gone, flown northward in most cases to nest on the tundra where long daylight hours for foraging mean they can fatten up their young in half the time it would take here.

Down on the seashore, sea pinks are opening on their holdfasts on the rocks, and the pools are full of shannies, small fish that dart for cover as my shadow falls. The tentacles of the beadlet anemones in the pools are extended, the tiny turquoise beads that encircle them catching the light.

It is low tide, and there is nothing on the sand but shells of a dozen varieties and my shadow walking beside me. Further on, I find myself crossing rippled sand, still wet and stippled with the casts of, literally, billions of fan-worm casts. There are clam shells here and there. I heard someone seeded an area of the beach twenty five years ago, so maybe these are the survivors of a failed enterprise. It hasn’t failed, for them.