Some unusual visitors to Irish shores

NEW YEAR’S Resolution: walk more.

I walk an average of five hours a week, except when I’m researching a walking guide like my recent Scenic Walks in West Cork.

Usually, I walk when I have the time and the mood is on me. I generally spend two to three hours on the hoof of a Sunday afternoon, and twice or three times during the week. Which leaves intervals in which I can grow fat.

I am also known to walk to the pub (10 minutes) but the pint (my wife tells me) nullifies the weight loss the exercise might achieve.

I’m fortunate in having what is called a high body metabolism. It protects me from putting on too much weight, but means that even on a sunny beach I can’t sit still but must be off looking at things. When sitting at home, I’m always hopping up to fetch or adjust something, or exercising my typing fingers (three) as I am now.

Walking in Spain is easier because of the weather and I see a notable change in the attitudes towards outdoor exercise since I first lived in that country 50 years ago. One meets women walking in small groups; male walkers are rarer and always seem to be solitary. However, the Spanish health authorities think the population do not take enough exercise and have installed municipal exercise machines in town and villages.

They are often stationed opposite the main supermarket.

This may be a subtle strategy. While the women keep fit pushing laden trolleys up and down the long aisles, their husbands sit in their cars dozing (or sucking ice cream cones, as is the habit of many west Cork farmers).

Seeing the machines, these unenlightened men may be tempted (or shamed) into interacting with the push-and-pull or pedalling devices, thus to reduce their waistlines for the delectation of wives who like thin husbands. Unfortunately, such exercise will not provide the added mental stimulation of supermarket mathematics, as available to their wives. However, perhaps one economist in the family is enough.

The exercise machines are sturdy and made to survive with little maintenance.

Everybody from small children to old codgers can enjoy them. They are self-pacing, responding to the user’s effort, as with a bicycle, or supermarket trolley. If the true motive for the ‘sugar tax’ proposed by Government ministers is to reduce the national waistline, would not these machines, backed with a health-awareness campaign, be more effective and more fun?

Since 1998, the Chinese government has created 4,000 ‘outdoor gyms’ in Beijing’s parks, streets and other public areas. Los Angeles has established a network of Fitness Zones around the city. In London, Adidas has established the first half dozen of the many giant, multi-sport outdoor venues which they intend to install in British cities. Perhaps, given our national penury, we could invite Adidas to sponsor such installations — called ‘adiZones’ — here. Meanwhile, Irish retirees spending the winters of their golden years in golden sunshine can enjoy the machines in Spain.

As our pensioners migrate southward, every year brings novel visitors from the south to our shores. In 2011, two readers reported leatherback turtles seen in the sea off west Cork. Giant ocean-wanderers — as large as a two-seater settee — leatherbacks leave their nesting beaches in central America and, following the jellyfish drifting on the Gulf Stream, pass the shores of Ireland. Some reach the Cape of Good Hope.

In late October, a dozen Glossy ibises, very rare in Ireland, visited Courtmacsherry Bay. I wrote that, since I was abroad at the time, I was possibly the only local resident that failed to see them. But then, after my return, and after their departure had been long since reported, I saw two women with binoculars and cameras on the bridge opposite Timoleague Abbey. Clearly excited, they pointed out a single ibis to me.

The following week, at the Coto Doñana on the estuary of the Guadalquivir in southern Spain, I enjoyed views of a small flock of the birds which included adults in glossy, purplish plumage. But it wasn’t as exciting as seeing that single bird at Timoleague.