Rare flights of fancy

One day last week we woke to sunshine after days of deluges and flooding on West Cork roads and (once again) in the towns of Bandon and Clonakilty.

We decided we get out for a walk quickly, while the going was good. I wanted to see if the ravens were building on the cliffs, and to check the heron nests in the woods below the house. Returning an hour later, we were barely indoors when the sky delivered first, our “domestic” heron and — as it stood by the pond awaiting breakfast — a hailstorm of rare ferocity.

Did the heron duck under the balcony to avoid the fusillade? Did it nip under the densely-leaved holly tree or the big clumps of sedge grass for comfort? Not a bit of it! It stood motionless in the middle of the yard, the hail hopping off it.

Are birds stupid or has evolution endowed them with extraordinary stoicism? It must have felt the hailstones bouncing on its skull and tap-dancing on its beak, but it did nothing to seek shelter, even when the hail changed to curtains of rain, wind-driven off the fields, so dense that I could hardly see the bird behind them.

It didn’t get drenched, of course. The water glanced off its back and when the deluge stopped, its feathers were all but as dry as they had been before the rain began. Nature never fails to astound me.

I wonder how the naked fledglings in the big, stick heron nests 70 feet up in the trees cope with the 24-hour long storms of late February and March. The eggs, numbering three to five, can be laid as early as January and the incubation, by both parents, takes 25 days.

Do the parents spread their broad wings like half umbrellas to shelter the young? Or are they equipped for the weather that sends us scurrying indoors from the day they are born? Our heron was blown out of its tree in March; we found it on March 15. Or, indeed, it might have been thrown out by a stronger sibling. Such unkindness is not unknown.

In the gardens and aviaries of The Golden Pheasant coffee and craft shop in Courtmacsherry, the eponymous bird no longer paces its large enclosure.

Last year, its neighbour, a Lady Amherst pheasant dug its way under the wire separating their aviaries and, with no apparent motive, committed murder most foul (fowl?). “Lady Amherst”: a beautiful name for a murderous bird (and no lady either, but patently a lord, set on slaughtering all other males bordering on its territory).

Both Lady Amherst and Golden Pheasants hail from China but have intermittently established feral populations here and in Britain. Our “native” pheasant is an introduction from the Caucuses and further east, possibly brought to Britain by the Romans.

When my wife and I recently walked the paths of Curraghmore estate near Portlaw, in Waterford, we saw at least a hundred pheasants (including an albino) foraging nonchalantly nearby, despite the presence of a shooting party with guns raised a few hundred yards away, along with a trailer of dead pheasants hanging by their necks on the rails.

In Courtmacsherry, The Golden Pheasant owners will shortly replace the murdered bird, while there are still many exotics, including cage-reared Eagle Owls, in the aviaries.