Nature springs Easter surprise on us

IT’S AMAZING how rapidly spring happens if the right weather comes along at the right time.

Over Easter, I spent a week in south western France, and when I came back, Ireland was a different country to the one I’d left.

On my first morning home, I lay in bed with the curtains open and watched two hares chasing each other round the big field. This athletic mating ritual was carried out against a yellow and white background. The yellow was furze flowers and the white was blackthorn blossom.

The field was yellow too — carpeted with dandelions. And there were other yellows in the lane — the cream of primroses and the butter of celandines. The sheer volume and variety of bird song in the mornings and evenings was also astounding.

Spring in the Midi was a little different. Last week, Richard Collins mentioned that the earliest a cuckoo has ever been recorded calling in Ireland was April 2, 1902. They are normally a May-time bird with us, but I heard two of them in France during the first week of April. We were nearer to their wintering grounds in Africa.

I reckon spring in the Midi is about three weeks ahead of the Irish midlands. This I mainly based on tree species. Horse chestnuts were already in leaf and the great plane trees lining the Canal du Midi were just breaking bud.

There were already plenty of swallows hawking over the canal, but in general, the bird-watching was disappointing. A couple of exotic things were seen — a pair of turtle doves, a greater spotted woodpecker and a glimpse in the dusk of something that may have been a nightjar.

But for the first few days, I was puzzled by a number of strange and exotic bird calls. I was continually clapping my binoculars to my eyes and searching the bushes to try and spot what was making the noises.

One call, in particular, sounded like a mad laugh and I was wondering if it could be a green woodpecker, so I carefully scanned the trunks of the plane trees. But after a couple of days, something eventually registered in my stagnant mind. The sound was most intense at dawn and dusk and it went on all through the night. This is not typical bird behaviour. Maybe they weren’t birds?

It was only after I got home and consulted experts and the internet that I finally solved the mystery. The mad laughing was the mating call of the yellow-bellied toad. It’s no wonder I couldn’t spot one. They don’t live in trees.

THE YELLOW-BELLIED toad is a member of the genus Bombina and is closely related to the eastern European fire-bellied toad — in fact, it may be a sub-species because they can inter-breed. Oriental fire-bellied toads are quite popular as pets in this country.

The number of reptiles and amphibians in this part of France is quite amazing. My son saw two different species of snake — one was long and green and was almost certainly a grass snake and the other was small and dark and was probably a slow-worm. Slow-worms are legless lizards not snakes, but he was so excited when he spotted it, I didn’t have the heart to be pedantic.

We saw newts, frogs and toads and plenty of regular lizards with legs. In most cases, they moved too quickly for us to identify the species. But we did, in fact, see one yellow-bellied toad and never made the connection with the strange ‘bird call’.

The canal bank at night sounded like a tropical rain forest with its massed chorus of amphibian music — the first animal sound ever heard on dry land on this planet.

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