NATURE Blackthorn, birdsong and April’s bounty

BACK HOME The vocal Chiffchaff has returned to Irish woods and hedgerows after wintering in warmer African climes.?
Pic: Flickr.com/Langham Birder


Blackthorn, birdsong and April’s bounty


Country sights and sounds
John Shelley

A thin rain drizzles continually from a limestone sky of such uniform colour it is difficult to see any movement in the blanket of cloud, despite the breeze that licks the lake into a light ripple.
I think of Bill, now stooped and grey, his striding gait slowing to the inevitable shuffle, only his hands monument of the man. ‘When the wind is from the west the fishes bite the best’. He often told me so. Sometimes he cast a mournful sigh and turned methodically to his work, and on other occasions gave a sidelong glance at the clock and a wink. We stole moments from the day, stowing spade and trowel and heading for the river, him working magic with his wand of cane and I doing my best to imitate his dexterous ability.
I was 14 when he pressed the cork handle of his seven-foot split bamboo rod into my palm. ‘Try this,’ he said, pointing out the mark of a rising trout. The line fell gently across the stickle. I can still see the tiny black gnat riding high on the current and the dark olive neb that engulfed it, then the cane arching and pulsing as the fish ran to the pool beneath before I beached it on the gravel.
Over the following years that rod was my constant companion until it broke on the branch of a tree one dark, sea-trouting night. Now I ply my angling trade with high-tech carbon fibre; it does the job admirably well yet feels somewhat mechanical.
Almost a century ago Fred Shoosmith wrote of man’s relationship with the world about him ‘Nature can and does so impress us with quietness and beauty that cares and anxieties are shed in a manner little short of miraculous’.
He quotes Mohammed too: ‘If any man hath two loaves of bread let him exchange one for flowers of the narcissus; for bread is food for the body, but the narcissus is food for the soul’.
Our modern narcissi bear little resemblance to the smaller, tough-as-Bill’s-old-boots wild varieties recommended by that Islamic sage. Numerous multi-coloured blooms nod greetings from beneath the apple boughs each day, and I confess I give them little thought, being too caught up with gathering my metaphorical loaves, even knowingly so.


APRIL’S BOUNTY St George’s mushroom, an edible, mostly-woodland mushroom, derives its name from when it first appears in Ireland and the UK, namely on St George’s Day (April 26).

I survey my list of chores. I could tread the garden soil to mud and risk paint being washed off the wall of the house as happened once before. There is shopping to do; clothes to buy, as if these hard-worn items in which I stand were not fit, even for Bill’s old friend.
On the other hand, the cream-coloured blossom of blackthorn adorns the banks of the River Robe and fills quiet moments with its spicy scent. Should such a thing go unannounced or unattended? Would the pretty Chiffchaff, fresh home from African heat, care if no-one ever heard his song, or would the wagtail gleam as bright were I not there to see?
But I was there a week ago, where the river is small and exuberant, and took a dozen trout in a happy hour. None were large enough to keep but we shall meet again in a summer month when they might have added that extra inch or two to their length; then there might be one for the pan.
There is a place where the unfriendly blackthorn gives way to an area of mature hawthorn trees, where the land was, until recently, abandoned to its course and held in its own kind of balance. Although cattle had grazed there every summer the ground grew thistle and dock as much as it did grass. Even ragwort was allowed to prosper along the banks of the stream.
There, too, we found round, off-white treasure-humps of St George’s mushroom each April, beneath those gnarled old thorns. This year there are none, for the ground has been cleared of its natural yield and given over to new grass. At least the trees have been spared.
What would Bill make of it? I know the answer. There is a bend in the stream where the bank has been cut deep by the action of countless spates. The current runs into a pocket over a bed of rock, where many a heavy fish has fallen to a floating fly. Low trees on the banks necessitate a long and careful cast. When the wind is from the west that cast can be made, and guess what? 
River trout narcissus, here I come.