Damien Enright: Nature is thrifty, and avoids feasts followed by famines

What attracts some of us to the cliffs and the wild shores?

Heather starting to flower on Seven Heads, West Cork, with ruined tower, built 1804-1806 as a lookout for the threat of the Napoleonic fleet arriving to invade Ireland.

We went to see the 30 choughs that gather and forage on the sparse grass of the cliffs above a remote cove on West Cork’s Seven Heads, an ideal ambience, symbiotic with such birds and, when sea-lashed, shared with ravens and the wild cries of gulls punctuating the roar of waves throwing spume high as breaching whales over the rocks below.

Well, hyperbole it might seem to be, but how else to describe the ambience encountered in such unchanged places?