Swallow was so close, yet so far

Damien Enright on late hatchlings that can’t make migration.

A FARMER tells me he saw a swallow flying over his yard near Durrus on November 1, hoovering up flies. We wondered what it could be doing, hanging around so long after the rest of its tribe had left.

We concluded that it may have been a very late hatchling from a second brood that had somehow survived after its parents had flown. He confirmed that the swallows in his barn had raised two broods this summer.

Almost every autumn, I hear reports of “perfect” young swallows found dead in the nest. Clearly, the parents had no option but to leave them when the wind and the weather was right to begin the marathon trek to South Africa. I have seen such starved and dried-out bodies of young swallows, all but fully fledged and ready to take to the wing. The desiccated corpses, their feathers still bright, are sad to find. Given another week or two, they would have learned to fly and, after fattening on insects in the Irish air, would have joined the twittering throng on their long, instinctive journey.

While the possibility that the solitary bird was an North American swallow blown off course when migrating south across the Caribbean must be considered, it could also have been a youngster from inland Ireland that had left it late because it still had some feeding to do to gain fat and fuel for the journey. Perhaps the shores of Dunmanus Bay was to be its launch-point for the flight over the Celtic Sea to northern Spain and thence south to cross the Mediterranean near Tarifa, then over Rif Mountains and the Atlas and the formidable Sahara. A lonely journey, with no guide but a sky-map engraved in its DNA, a young bird that has never made the journey before.

If it was making the journey in November, at least it would have been too late to attract the attention of the Elenora falcons whose DNA schedules them to nest and hatch on the Mediterranean cliffs in September when there are myriad dinners-on-the-wing to snatch amongst the flocks migrating south.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve written about my trans-Morocco journey but I recall a few items that I haven’t mentioned.

In early October, I commented on a book about hedgehogs called A Prickly Affair. A week later, I found myself in a Moroccan medicine shop looking at an array of dried hedgehog skins, complete with spines. It seems that locally the odd pint of hedgehog blood is considered an effective cure for asthma. How much would that be, I asked, one hedgehog-full or two? The owner — probably detecting the bronchial flutings of a one-time smoker — suggested he supply me with a curative dose next day. I politely declined.

Honey bees, whose scarcity throughout Europe caused much concern this summer, were plentiful in Fes and Casablanca. They hummed in clouds over the nougat stalls in the alleys of the souk. Nobody was stung. They crawled over the exposed nougat in armies but neither vendors nor customers seemed to care.

In Salé, on the coast near Rabat, I discovered the origin of the name given to the small jellyfish known as Sally Rovers that sometimes wash up in legions on our strands. Walkers are regularly mystified by the transparent “plastic” discs, each a few inches in diameter and patterned with concentric rings as regular as if stamped out by a machine. Sometimes the bluish triangular sail-bladder, thin as cling film, is still attached. From the shape of this sail, like that of a dhow, they are named after the corsair-pirates from Salé who roamed the European seaboards in the 17th century.

I am told that spud-pickers are hard to find in my local parish of Barryroe. Barryroe has some of the richest land in Co Cork, and the farmers are rich too. My father once told me that when he was accountant at the Munster and Leinster Bank in Clonakilty in the 1940s, the sub-office at Timoleague, where the Barryroe farmers banked, took in more cash that from the town itself and the other parishes.