Scourge of starlings a sight to behold

Damien Enright on a stunning November spectacle.

THE leaves rain down. Yes, and they rise up too, and they fly horizontally, the beech leaves, russet and brown.The other morning, I looked up from what I was writing and saw, through the French windows of my workroom, the dead leaves in the yard become possessed and rise in a spiral, going round and round, as high as the roof of the annex, 20-foot high, caught in a sheegaoite, a fairy wind, like the ones my wife tells me used to sometimes arrive in the hayfields in her home place and lift the cut hay into a twister against the blue sky.

Blue sky and the smell of new- mown hay. How far that is from the grey skies and odour of decaying leaves we now suffer in November. But, there’s always something to be seen and, indeed, in the soft Atlantic rain-mists we experience in this part of the world, nature is often to be found in active pursuit of its day-to-day business, rain or mist regardless.