Butterflies — eye-candy on the wing

AS I left to go looking for parasol mushrooms, I noticed the sedum and the valerian in the garden were teeming with butterflies and I couldn’t resist, as usual, stopping to take some photographs, such glorious creatures they were.

The array included peacocks, small tortoiseshells, red admirals and speckled woods. Their splendour, three or four together on the purple tops of the tall verbena or on the pink cushions of low-growing sedum, was eye-candy on the wing. It was heart-warming to see them. Butterflies were scarce all summer. Now, in autumn, they were here again, and in small clouds.

I found no mushrooms in the woods but it seems that one has only to spend half an hour wandering out of doors to be educated in some new aspect — or mystery — of natural history.

I was intrigued to see the skeleton of a huge sweet chestnut, stripped of its bark and in places decaying, with suckers or saplings growing out of the dead carcass, these already six inches in diameter and nearly 30 feet tall. Life after death, so to speak.

The fallen tree itself was 45 foot long and, strangely, there was the remains of a small platform still hanging by nails to what would have been the crown. Was it put there when the tree was half-grown, as a tree-house? But I’ve never seen children or families in that pathless old wood, full of dead trunks and badger setts. I could only conclude that, years ago, it had been erected as a nesting platform, perhaps for long-eared owls.

Meanwhile, white feathers shone amongst the ground ivy in the half darkness or in the dappled light; our new-come little egrets nest there, along with grey herons, and huge flocks of rooks shelter there in winter.

I saw a fine, robust sessile oak, its canopy, 60 feet overhead, so dense that only slivers of sky could be seen through the tracery of the leaves.

Then, on its unbranched trunk, I noticed a yellow mass the size of my hand, moving and changing shape and glowing as if enamelled. Around it some red admiral butterflies flew, sometimes perching on the bark.

It was a host of wasps, feeding on sap from a fissure in the trunk. The red admirals too, were feeding on the sap; it must have been very sweet, attracting wasps and admirals, insects which love to feed on over-ripe apples on the orchard floor.

I watched, fascinated, and took yet more photos, of course. When anyone will ever have time or interest to look at my hundreds of nature photographs I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter; there is the joy of closely studying the creatures and attempting to snap them at their best in the best light.

Regarding wasps, a friend tells me that badgers obliging dug out and tore a wasp nest to shreds on a ditch in his boreen. It was narrow and walking past the nest was hazardous. For badgers, wasp grubs make a satisfying meal.

Mark Gannon of Courtmacsherry Sea Angling tells me these days the ocean is full of fish, mammals and reptiles. On an outing the other day, he spotted basking sharks, a sun fish, a number of minke whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals, and a leatherback turtle as big as a chaise longue cruising along on the surface, minding its own business, on the Irish leg of its round-trip from the Gulf of Mexico.

Jellyfish are more plentiful in our colder waters and leatherbacks eat even the very poisonous species with impunity. Thus, not only mammals (badgers) but reptiles (leatherbacks) provide a useful service for mankind.

My son tells me the dock in Galway city centre was teeming with mackerel, and a fat cormorant got trapped between the dock gates and the adjacent wall when the gates were opened. It sat there, seeming unperturbed, for a number of hours.

Looking down on it from above, he had never been so close to a cormorant in his life.

In my column of August 29, I said that Niall Collins TD wrote a letter to Limerick County Council supporting a planning application by a Mr Dowling on a site near the Great Southern Trail. It emerges that he wrote no such letter. We apologise for the error.