Just let nature work its wonder

Damien Enright enjoys an exciting time outdoors.

AS we look out on the field of the adjacent estate, from the dining room on the second floor of our house, it is half past seven and an evening of drifting rain.

The horses graze on; the magpies continue to build their big-domed nest in a tree on the rise, against the grey sky; the rabbits hop, oblivious to the weather, their white scuts bouncing through the grass; and a cock pheasant walks elegantly and unconcerned into the drizzle. Rain doesn’t faze nature a bit.

Last week, in the rain, I put a nest box on a tree and hadn’t walked 20 paces before a blue tit was busy inspecting the roof, then the entrance hole, then looking inside. A great tit is ensconced in another nesting ‘facility’, made from a drainpipe, painted green. It’s clearly a des. res., the first to be occupied each year.

On sunny days last week, warm as mid-summer, shield bugs, hover flies, bumble bees and butterflies were all on the wing. Newly awakened from hibernation, the peacocks and small tortoiseshells were in vivid colour. Peacock feed on sally blossom in spring, and can migrate as far as Iceland.

A song thrush sings each evening from the flowering cherry in the garden. With its mate, it forages in the field, along with pairs of blackbirds, chaffinches, grey crows and magpies. A reader telephoned me to ask how he might keep magpies from stealing the eggs of a song thrush in his garden, as they did last year. I didn’t know what to advise. Some would say shoot the magpies, but they are such gorgeous birds. As I write, one is sitting on the bird table outside my window, its black wings intermittently turquoise or gold as it catches the evening sun. As long as there have been song birds, there have been magpies. Nature, as we know, has its checks and balances, and perhaps it’s best we don’t interfere.

We hear of the decimation of trout in the River Moy and Lough Cara, by cormorants or mink, and we resent these predators because the trout are ours, not theirs, to harry or husband. Anglers bring euro, sterling or dollars, and charity begins at home.

Feeding cormorants is not a priority. Similarly, fishermen would hardly have been as enthusiastic as the small crowd that gathered on Courtmacsherry Bay last weekend to see a fine lump of a young, grey seal released after convalescence at the Seal Sanctuary in Dublin.

It had been found in January, barely 20 inches long and weighing only 10 kilos. Cast up in a storm, it had struggled 50 yards from the shore onto a domestic lawn. A seal on the lawn sounds like fairies at the bottom of the garden, but there it was, bedraggled and disorientated when Diane McMahon’s greyhound came upon it. In Dublin, it was fed on herrings and, two months later, weighing in at 40kg, it was relaunched where it had come ashore. It swam out, but then returned. It was some time before it bade farewell to humans and free herring lunches and set off to sea, poking its head above the water, further and further out, before it disappeared.

Now is an exciting time outdoors; nature, in spring, is confident, unhesitating, investing in the future, never mind the downturn in the Irish housing market. The first sand martin flew in from Africa, to build in Ireland, on March 21, the first sandwich tern on March 23, the first wheatear on March 31. The woods are full of wood anemones; the rhododendron that first flowered in February is now in full, glorious bloom. There is a chance that cattle egrets, not having left west Cork since their arrival last winter, may nest alongside their little egret cousins and add another thing of beauty to our landscape.

Meanwhile, indoors, our local Butlerstown variety group put on another marvellous show. The hall, seating 250 people, was filled to bursting every night for seven nights, with those arriving less than an hour and a half before curtain time turned away. The company of 107 local participants outdid themselves; a wonderful atmosphere and not a dull moment or flat note in the entire show.