Lending a helping hand to feed heron

IT has been another week of lovely weather. Bluebells carpet the woodland floor, primroses burst into colour on the ditches, and the butterflies are flying again.

By the time you read this, I hope to be in Extremadura in the Monfrague National Park, watching eagles and vultures touring the skies, my expenses paid by my family who bought me a ticket to this iconic wildlife area of Spain.

I worked through most of Christmas and Easter — no complaints, I brought it on myself, with books on the go and deadlines to meet. Don’t look the proverbial gift animal in the mouth is my policy, and book deals do not arrive every day. But a week watching the eagles fly and listening to the bees buzz will be very welcome.

Since childhood, I’ve always enjoyed whiling hours away watching the behaviour of wild things, be they trout in a stream, thrushes on a lawn or ants in the dust. My brother used to compare me to a cow looking over a gate, but I ignored him.

What worthwhile moments they can be! Today, I’ve watched our domestic heron, now standing on the edge of our first floor balcony, flex its wings to exercise them preparatory to taking flight. It will not fly for some days yet — but the sooner the better. It is, indeed, a fine-looking bird and a lot more interesting than a canary, but the need to feed it — and to deal with its defecations when it was confined to a shed — have been somewhat taxing. Now, in the open, it will be less so. Today, it is sweating in the heat. Every now and then, it opens its beak wide and its gullet palpitates like a small bellows at work. This is, I believe, how birds keep cool. We have rigged up a large, black, funeral umbrella for it to shelter under but it hasn’t yet availed.

This evening, when the tide falls, I will go to the rock pools to find it some live fish. Last week, one of the trawler men was kind enough to keep a few small, live dabs and plaice in a bucket of sea water, but it seemed unable to cope with these. However, when I put a shanny (a small, rock-pool fish) into a plastic washing-up bowl half-filled with sea water, and then, deliberately, dropped one of the bits of pollock with which I was feeding the bird into the bowl, it grabbed the morsel and then the shanny, which it neatly turned around, before swallowing it head-first, poor fish.

I have an affection for shannies, and don’t like doing this but the bird has to learn to hunt and it has no parents to teach it. I recently saw two adult herons fishing, with two youngsters attentively watching and being fed by them as they stalked the shallows in a team. However, I cannot don rubber boots and an imitation beak and provide the youngster with lessons. By putting small fish in a bowl, I can facilitate it and, if its securing of the wriggly shanny is anything to go by, it will learn on its own.

Meanwhile, the fishermen have obligingly provided me with bycatch, but I forgot to take enough to supply the heron over the Easter when they didn’t go to sea. It didn’t like frozen fish in breadcrumbs or fish-fingers and, eventually, we had to take a fine hake out of the freezer and feed it with that.

At Easter, The Way of the Cross was performed through the streets of Courtmacsherry, not a poor imitation of Oberammergau but the unique response of a small community to the memory of a man whom, history tells us, gave his life to promote values more likely to bring peace and happiness than the obsessive pursuit of wealth. I’d been asked to play Pontius Pilate but had to decline the honour, being abroad during rehearsals.

Having arrived home in time to see the event, I was impressed with its simple poignancy. As the brave volunteer who played Jesus was raised on the cross, a hushed silence fell over the spectators, raising goose-pimples on this onlooker for one. Thunder boomed loudly from the public address system as he ‘died’. The sky suddenly cleared and drenched the scene in sunlight. On Good Friday, 2011, values transcending the economic were palpable in this small village in west Cork.