BATH TIME?Great Tits are among the many birds thankful of the warm, wet weather’s return.
Singin’ in the rain
Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley
We left a brown and listless Mayo in thin and meagre sunshine, taking the road south, through Ballinrobe and on, through that comically antiquated, undulating landscape with its ring forts and follies both ancient and modern. Galway presented us with more of the same, with lean cattle on leaner ground. Clare was greener by a shade or two, and then Limerick, where livestock cropped proper grass instead of picking at the hedgerows.
At the far end of that kindest of the western counties we found Kerry and might have been back home, so drab were the hills and familiar the weather. A dark cloud had been following us all the way from the city of Limerick. It was finally breached as the heavens opened and rain, such rain as we haven’t seen in more than a month, fell as a deluge. Traffic slowed to a crawl as wipers failed to keep windscreens clear. Spidery rivulets appeared on the sides of hills, converging upon each other to form streams. Streams poured into rivers and those same, tame rivers became boisterous before our eyes until a clinging mist closed in to hide them from our view.
Then in the far distance we could see blue sky while above us clouds grew more and more dense, bringing an early and sudden dusk. We climbed hills and descended the far side, rounded dark corners and squinted to read road signs. And then as swiftly as the storm had come so it departed, leaving high ground ablaze with gorse and thorn hedges as suddenly green as those Limerick fields had been.
‘Oh, to be in Ireland now that summer’s here’. Robert Browning wrote those words, or something like them, but of April and England. It’s true we toy with the idea of going somewhere beautiful to find the sun, but where on earth is as pretty as our own western seaboard?
Nor is it just a simple beauty that holds us here, nor the clean Atlantic air nor the colours after rain. As if to prove it to ourselves we walked at the edge of night with the wind in the trees and the last of the light fading in the west, where birds picked up their spring song at last.
There was the Great tit in the hawthorn, suddenly full of cheer. He had sung in tune with the easterly wind while it was with us, a thin, cold and joyless song; now he called out new and fresh, exciting his mate who flitted through the twigs beneath. Last year they had young by now; they will have them soon again.
A Chiffchaff threw his own song to the wind from the bushes by the road. Newly back from Mediterranean sun, he calls for a mate. ‘Chiff chaff, chiff chaff, chiff chaff,’ over and again. His Irish name is ‘Tiuf teaf’, which sounds even more like the short and repetitive phrase that gives him so plainly away.
And there, there is a cousin of his, the Willow warbler, with his delightful little verse. If we saw this bird alongside the Chiffchaff we might have difficulty in telling the two apart. But let them sing. Country folk call this little character ‘Ceolaire sailí’, and if we can imagine those words played as the descending upper range of a soft whistle then we know where the name is from. Two weeks ago he was still in northern Africa, thinking of the long flight to be undertaken, just to be in Ireland now that summer’s here.
While these fair-weather visitors continue to arrive from lands to the south, so other birds will be departing to their northern nesting grounds. Until very recently we still had small numbers of redwing and fieldfare, although these have been mere stragglers. The main flocks left us soon after the wind changed, together with most of those blackbirds that came here from Scotland and Scandinavia back in November.
Down at the coast we found one lone Light-bellied Brent goose, a winter visitor from the high Arctic. Disturbed to find itself under observation, it waddled through shallow mud before flying four hundred yards to the west where it came to ground once more. Its flight was laboured and its calls melancholy. The others must be on their way home while this individual was not fit for the journey.
I wouldn’t give it long. Fox cubs are hungry in their dens. A goose alone, without the watchful eyes of its companions, will make a valuable meal.
There are poor pickings yet, though not for long. Warm rain and sunshine, a glut of it, is arriving in the fairest land of all.
