Thank god (wits) some birds don’t think

EXCUSE MY old Norse but what a bummer of a summer to come home to, after flying all the way from Iceland.

I left the nesting grounds early so as to beat the mob flying home in September, my breeding plumage still in fine colour, my breast red and plump as a September haw. Now it is dull, drenched and bedraggled as I stand shivering on a west Cork slob.

When my mate and I set off for Ireland, our genetic duty done, some youngsters followed, fine young black-tailed godwits, already strong enough for the 900-mile flight. No doubt they assumed we adults knew what we were doing when we flew southeast. Maybe they thought we were taking them on summer holidays, to somewhere they could bask in the sun.

Now, standing browned off on an Irish mud-flat, wings behind my back, I try to whistle nonchalantly as if nothing’s wrong. I can feel the eyes of the youngsters on me. Are you daft, they seem to ask, bringing us to a land of eternal rain, the weather already growing cold and August not even over?

Indeed, yes, I reflect, this year the summer went wrong. In glorious April, in the halcyon days of spring, my new-found mate and I left our west Cork bay for Iceland, where we could raise a family in double-quick time; she besotted by my reddening chest, I bewitched by her fine feathers. Now, we return to a land of creeping damp and bone-chilling rain, unseasonable, unreasonable and unacceptable: I feel like taking off for the Azores.

In Iceland, we found a nest site on the tundra. We billed, even if we couldn’t coo (we leave that to pigeons) and settled down to raising a family quickly and getting back to Ireland and our salubrious slob. In Iceland, the summer days were long — all the more time to find food for the chicks, to raise them fast and set off southward.

Thankfully, my godwit friends aren’t depressed. With the exception of myself, thought is beyond the mental powers of godwits.

Happily, for them, the rain is just there: they don’t think about it. The ever-increasing green weed under their feet is just there: they don't think about that either. There is no before, no after: they do not entertain such concepts. They are eternally in ‘now’. The world is thus and always has been. To accept it is the only way to endure.

Meanwhile, as the aforesaid disgruntled godwit stands complaining, your human columnist tries to make the best of the fleeting hours of sunlight. Clouds scud overhead and rain is never far off but there is much to be enjoyed in the lanes, the haws, in tons, brilliant on the trees.

However, here the weather seems to be playing tricks, too. An observant reader points out that the branches of the hawthorns are also sprouting new leaves, quite out of season, and the blackberries are bitter: the times, as Shakespeare said, are out of sorts.

But there are compensations. On the cliffs, a black cloud of chattering choughs passes over and then returns, tumbling and riding the thermals above our heads; there may be 30 in the troupe.

Choughs, with their glossy black plumage, red beaks and legs, are holding their own on our coasts. One of our seven Irish crow species, they are now absent from all but a few areas of Britain.

Unfortunately, ragwort, the yellow long-stalked weed which finds its way into hay, and is fatal to cattle and horses, is more than just surviving this year.

In 2003, a reader with a sense of irony said it was so prolific on verges that she wondered if the county councils were cultivating it. Another reader said that, in her youth, farmers had to have it pulled out by August 15 or face prosecution.

It is still an offence under the Noxious Weeds Act, 1936, but the fine is risibly small. Now, proposed new legislation may mean that landowners, including county councils, will face €1,000 fines for failing to control it.

Last Sunday, I did my best to help by transferring some undernourished cinnabar moth caterpillars from a groundsel to a leafy ragwort. They are natural ragwort-disposal units but, unfortunately, pesticides have decimated the moths.