NATURE Golden moments as spring settles in

Golden Plover

Golden moments


Country sights and sounds
John Shelley

The flood, at last, has gone back a bit, so that the road directly to the north is passable once more. The red, triangular warning signs remain where they were placed some weeks ago, boasting ‘Road Flooded’ in words the size of spread-eagled crows. A steady stream of traffic hums along as if making up for lost time.
The adjacent pasture, having been so long under water, is ahome to flocks of birds. Golden plover were there to feast on drowned worms, together with an assortment of gulls and the ubiquitous grey-backed crow that had gathered for the same purpose. The plover seem to spend more than half their time aloft in a dense, fluttering flock and the remainder of it standing still and alert, so that one wonders when they really feed. We call them a congregation, or a ponderance, conveying the notion of carefully weighing up the consequence of considered action. And indeed, these dozens of solemn waders have a somewhat magisterial air about them.  
The Latin genus is Pluvialis, which roughly translates as pertaining to rain or to floods – and here they are, at the edge of one, and hopefully at the end of it too. The song of the plover is a mournful one, a sort of downturned fluting whistle (perhaps sorry at its watery home), almost the opposite of the uplifted (and uplifting) call of the curlew.
How we miss that one! A friend told me of 30 or more curlew feeding at low tide on the Carrowniskey shoreline. We would like them to be Irish birds but they are not. No, the Irish curlew has just about vanished. The flocks that come to feed on sand worms along our Atlantic strands are refugees from Europe that come here every year to fill us with hope – a hope that disappears as surely as the curlew fly home with the west wind at their tails. Away they go to find rough acres where they can remain undisturbed. They are birds we cannot buy and are all the more precious for that.
We are in negotiations for a hive of bees, or maybe two. The fields about us fill with a succession of wildflowers through the year, so much so that I entertained the notion of beekeeping as a means of availing myself of what must surely be a prodigious harvest. Another man has honey by the bucket, thanks to his neighbours, who allow him a few square yards of space and access. He rewards them with pots of liquid amber.
The closest we have to bees are wasps. It is easy to forget the good these do and to kill them on sight. The mild weather has allowed a good many queen wasps to survive. Now they come out of hibernation, fat-bodied, black-banded, poison darts all looking for a place to start building. Two small paper cells will start their city. In time it will host thousands of individual insects that share a common goal – to plague mankind. Yet we allow them to remain, conscious that future problems might be averted with an early strike but also aware of the place of the wasp in its world and the potential that it performs more of a service than we can fully understand.
Our barn owl (last year there were two; one seems missing) has started appearing at dawn and again at dusk, a ghostly white shape in the gloaming. This crepuscular habit is more pronounced through the longer days – or is it merely I being out there instead of in here? Both, perhaps.
In the ancient woodland the first of the wild anemones are flowering. A few days from now the woodland floor will be a carpet of brilliant white stars, all of them atremble on even the stillest of days. We know them as wind-flowers, perhaps because their trembling betrays the slightest movement of the air. Their very name, anemone, come from the Greek anemos, for wind. The suffix nemorosa means ‘of the woods’. The wood anemone, then, becomes the rather charming ‘wind of the woods’.
Where they grow was ankle-deep in water for two months or more. We had wondered how they would fare in such inclement conditions; they are tougher than they look. To walk among them as the day begins to fade and the owl flights under the far hedge is more than therapy. It is there that the calls and cries of flocking plover are translated, and that we understand why we let the wasp live.