Enjoy a flight of fancy in your parish

A READER tells me a pair of racing pigeons, with rings, arrived at his farm four months ago, stayed around the yard and have now hatched two eggs, both parents sitting.

A single stray racing pigeon is not unusual but two, and of opposite genders at that, would seem to me like an elopement.

They are pretty birds, he says, but the squabs will, of course, look as hideous as only pigeon offspring can. Few wild bird offspring look attractive when hatched while farmyard “day-old chicks”, all golden and fluffy-feathered are positively “cute” as Americans might say.

How parent pigeons can love their offspring beggars belief. I realise that ascribing love to pigeons is somewhat stretching it but they, like other birds, care for their young tirelessly.

Lately, we see dunnocks, chaffinches and great tits still carrying beaks-full of caterpillars to their young at 10.15 at night. They have been at it since dawn-break, and will continue all day, every day, until the chicks are reared. Reproduction is the spur. They continue, undeterred by the recent downpours and dreeping foliage.

These downpours have been a unwelcome interruption to the recent weeks of halcyon days and nights when the temperature was 22.5C at noon and 12C at midnight, when sun-tanned holidaymakers sat outside our local pubs at half past nine, talkative and friendly, and we residents considered ourselves fortunate to have that ambience come to us, as it does every summer in this village by the sea. We hope the sunshine will return, for the visitors’ sake and ours. As I write, it is, a damp, deep green world outside my workroom windows, with spuds, lettuces and spinach, ferns, docks and nettles all bolting heaven-ward thanks to the nurturing rain. When it stops, the earth steams and in the hazy warmth we might, with a leap of the imagination, think we are in the Amazon basin. Hyperbole is forgivable when one looks out on Gunnera leaves as big as small cars and getting bigger, despite one’s effort to control the rootstock last year.

While my reader has had a pair of pigeons come to stay, we have had house sparrows, two pairs, regularly attending the feeder. We hope they will nest next year and bring a blessing to the house as is traditionally believed. House sparrows live in symbiosis with humans: there were probably no house sparrows in Ireland before the arrival of our farming ancestors, Neolithic Man. As mankind spread out of Africa, the sparrows followed. Africa was their original home – recently, they have been re-classified as members of the Weaver Bird family. When they nest away from houses (which they rarely do) they build domed nests, sometimes in colonies.

In recent years, house sparrow number have fallen drastically and, so, they are to be treasured all the more. Food scarcity is probably the reason. No longer do horse carts or horses’ nosebags leak oats or barley onto the road; no longer is grain spilled in the fields.

Along with the sparrows, I would welcome swallows or martins to the sheds and eaves. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Banquo, upon escorting Duncan, King of Scotland, to Macbeth’s castle where he will pass the night, notes that it is frequented by “the temple-haunting martlet” and remarks that “Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed/ The air is delicate”. Hardly so, in this case. Macbeth will, that very night, murder the king.

Birds have figured in literature since the earliest times and a book replete with quotations about birds and all natural things has recently been authored by Joseph Horgan, a poet, and entitled The Song At Your Backdoor. Published by The Collins Press at €12.99, it is a veritable lexicon of quotations and references. Engagingly written, it takes one on a journey – “a walk”, Horgan calls it, “over eight or nine miles of land” – which expands, through observation, reading and research, not only into an exploration of the natural world in west Cork, where he has settled (he hails from England originally) but into the idea that the universal can be found within the landscape of a parish. The Song is, thus, more than a local book. As Patrick Kavanagh said (and Horgan quotes) “All great civilisations are based on parochialism.” How right he was – what can be learned in the parish can be applied to the world.